1 



THE 

KINDS OF POETRY 

■ 

JOHN ERSKINE 



r*1 




Class _ 
Book 
Copyright F. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 



OTHER BOOKS BY 

JOHN ERSKINE 

THE MORAL OBLIGATION 
TO BE INTELLIGENT 

and Other Essays 

DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS 
(With W. P. Trent) 

POETRY 

ACTION AND OTHER 
POEMS 

THE SHADOWED HOUR 

HEARTS ENDURING 

A Play in one Scene 



THE 

KINDS OF POETRY 

and Other Essays 



BY 



JOHN ERSKINE 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK 

DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 

1920 



r 






Copyright, 1920, by 
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 






Printed in the United States of America 



JUL -3 1920 
CI.A571595 



To 
RENE GALLAND 

Ad unguem 
Foetus homo . . . non ut magis alter amicus. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Kinds of Poetry 3 

The Teaching of Poetry 43 

The New Poetry 99 

Scholarship and Poetry 143 



NOTE 

Of these essays, the first appeared in the Jour- 
nal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific 
Methods for November 7, 1912; the second ap- 
peared in the Columbia University Quarterly 
for December, 1915; the third appeared in the 
Yale Revieiv for January, 1917. The fourth 
essay is here printed for the first time. 

It should be observed, perhaps, that the first 
and second essays consider chiefly the reader's 
attitude toward poetry, and that the third and 
fourth essays emphasize rather the writer's point 
of view. 

J. E. 
Columbia University. 

February, 1920. 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 



THE many attempts in the last quar- 
ter-century to describe or define lit- 
erary genres have assumed in poetry 
some such evolution as can be demon- 
strated in geology or anatomy. Literary 
scholarship has chiefly taught itself to see 
in the drama a development from the re- 
ligious rites of Greece or of the Middle 
Age, to hear in the lyric thin echoes of 
Lesbos or Provence, and to suspect be- 
hind these beginnings, as behind the Ho- 
meric epic, lost tracts of primitive poetry 

[3] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

that reach to the earliest mutterings of 
the race. To this understanding of poetr jr 
and its career the anthropologists, beyond 
their intention, have been most friendly; 
their gatherings of folk-song from races 
or tribes all but incoherent, furnish oblique 
evidence for the scholar's guess after for- 
gotten poetic origins, much as the surviv- 
ing monkey witnesses to kindred aspects 
in our parentage. The study of the begin- 
nings of poetry is now usually supposed 
to call for the same kind of deduction 
and induction from fossils and belated 
survivals as the study of the origin 
of the horse. Is it too presumptuous to 
suggest that in this whole drift of literary 
research there is confusion of ideas? 

In the first place, you cannot follow 
the track of anything that changes until 
you have some minimum of definition or 
standard or guide to assure you that from 

[4] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

change to change you are still following 
one thing, and not discovering something 
new. If this generalization is sweeping, 
at least it can hardly be disputed by the 
historians of literary genres, who have all 
in some measure assumed and acted upon 
it. But so far as literature is concerned 
it does not seem too sweeping. Before 
you can inquire into the lowliest phases 
of life you must assume, as a scientist, 
what every man instinctively feels, that 
life under all its appearances is one thing. 
To uncover the history of any kind of 
poetry, you must carry along with you 
an image, a definition, of what you would 
identify. Yet the lyric, the drama, the 
epic, are still after much discussion unde- 
fined, and students of literature are be- 
come so reconciled to the unscientific slip- 
periness of their terminology that they ex- 
pect no one to mean any specific thing by 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

"lyric" or "drama"; they merely try to 
discover, in each use of each term, the 
user's idiosyncrasy, the unconscious mark 
of himself or his breeding. Or if they feel 
the need of taming this chaos, they put 
their hope in those histories of genres, 
already mentioned, which are supposed to 
describe if not to define. Yet until there is 
first a definition of what is eternally lyri- 
cal, eternally dramatic, how can we know 
the evolution of lyric or drama? 

Such a definition — in the second place — 
is indispensable not merely to any logical 
inquiry into evolution, but much more to 
any fair statement of what men in general 
think poetry is. In our ordinary thought 
we conceive of poetry just as we conceive 
of life itself, as subject to no development 
whatever. Things either have existed or 
they have not; the utterances of the race, 
similarly, have been either poetry or not 

[6] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

poetry. It is no contradiction of this 
view that what to one age seems poetic is 
often unpoetic to the next; for in every 
such case it is not the poetry but the lan- 
guage, the medium of it, which time has 
rendered obsolete. Nor does materialistic 
science present any obstacle to this instinc- 
tive selection of the eternal and universal 
in life and poetry. Indeed, the more ma- 1 ( 
terialistic our explanation of life and the 
more anatomical our account of poetry, | 
the less importance will the evolution of 
either have in comparison with its per- I 
manent aspects. If consciousness is but 
a fortunate conjunction and behavior of 
atoms, how wonderful that the myriad dif- 
ferent combinations of atoms should have 
a consciousness in common and should un- 
derstand each other. If poetry is but an 
accident of syllables, a fortunate stirring 
of connotations, emotional and mental, 

[7] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

how extraordinary that we should agree 
that some connotations are poetic and oth- 
ers not. To be sure, life and poetry do 
appear in degree and variations; but to 
say quantitatively that a man is barely 
alive or that a piece is almost poetry does 
not in the least affect the qualitative dis- 
tinction we all make between living and 
dead, poetic and unpoetic. 
. Yet, though the evolutionary historian 
; has not shared this view of poetry as an 
j unchanging function of an unchanging 
life, it will not do to say, even to imply, 
that he has contributed nothing to our 
knowledge. He has only failed to add to 
our knowledge of poetry. He has made 
clearer some aspect of the form, the meter, 
the imagery — what in a large sense we may 
call the language — of poetry; and in this 
field his method is practicable, since lan- 
( guage does undergo evolution, and its 

[8] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

relation to poetry is only secondary ft 
though indispensable, like the relation of 
the body to life. To take a ready illus- 
tration, the accounts of the development 
of the drama are for the most part studies 
of the expression of drama — studies of 
language, in the large sense — of the num- 
ber of actors, the shape of the stage, the 
conditions of presentation; or, more sub- 
tly, studies of theme, of reversals of for- 
tune and combat with fate. In every such 
case the preliminary definition which de- j 
termined the evolution was based not on 
the drama, but on the expression of it, or I* 
on its subject-matter. Drama is that ' 
which can be acted, postulates one histor- 
ian, and then goes trailing the drama with 
this lantern, though perhaps he would not 
agree that everything actable is dramatic. 
Tragedy, begins the more subtle scholar, 
taking his cue from Aristotle, is that kind 

[9] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

of drama which deals with a tragic inci- 
dent, a destructive or painful action, such 
as death or agony or wounds. Yet the 
Tale of Troy furnishes as apt subject- 
matter for the lyric or the epic as for the 
drama, of which the scholar told us trag- 
edy is a kind. And even if he hedges 
himself round with all these postulates at 
once, and says that tragedy deals with 
such and such subject-matter and must be 
actable, we still can see how the Tale of 
Troy might be staged and yet turn out to 
be a lyric after all. The scholar has sim- 
ply failed to put something in his defini- 
tion that would make certain the dramatic 
quality of his tragedy. Illustrations from 
other kinds of poetry are as easily cited. 
He who traces a literary genre like the 
elegy, let us say, and determines what is 
an elegy by some metrical characteristic, 
is really chronicling the use of that meter 
Cio] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

— just as the scientist who would write 
the history of man hy showing the evolu- 
tion of his anatomy, really traces only the 
history of his anatomy. That language, 
the whole dress of poetry, is as necessary 
to it as the body is to the phenomenon of 
life, justifies any amount of study upon 
it, but it should not be confused with the 
study of poetry. 

Even if poetry were subject to evolu- 
tion, it would be wise to study it in its lat- 
est development. The significance of life 
is not in the lowest cell, but in the soul of 
the most spiritual man; and if we are in- 
terested in defining the oak, why turn our 
back upon it, to draw conclusions from an 

acorn? But it is time to distinguish be- 

1 — i 
tween language, which has an evolution- 
ary career, and poetry, which has not. The 
English tongue has evolved since Shakes- 
peare's day, but poetry is just what it 
[ill 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

was. Kill off every horse in the world, 
and you destroy the species. Kill off every 
known and suspected poet, and there will 
be as many as ever after a generation or 
two. If the language were destroyed, 
ages would be needed to evolve another; 
but poetry, being a constant function of 
life, is rooted as it were perpendicularly 
in every moment of consciousness, and not 
horizontally, trailing back long feelers into 
mist-hidden swamps of primitiveness. 



II 



It is the aim of this paper to see what 
progress can be made toward defining 
poetic genres by throwing overboard all 
idea of evolution and considering poetry 
as an invariable function of life. In one 
sense, all poetry is of one kind, and is eas- 
ily described. Ordinarily the emotions 
[12] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

aroused by experience are used up in the 
further process of living. The poet dif- 
fers from his fellows only in the greater 
power of his emotions, in the greater im- 
perativeness of his intuitions, whereby it 
is easier for him to express them in words 
than to consume them in life. The stimu- 
lus that enters the poet's nature and comes 
out as epical or dramatic or lyrical ex- 
pression, enters equally the nature of or- 
dinary man and is consumed in lyrical or 
epic or dramatic living. However theo- 
retical or dogmatic this parallel may seem, 
in practice it is recognized by all men. A 
poet's temperament prescribes into which 
of the three genres his work shall fall ; and 
similarly the temperament of average men 
prescribes whether they shall live in the 
present, or in the past, or in the future. 
In these three eternal ways of meeting ex- 
perience, it is believed, are to be found the 

[13] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

definitions of the lyric, the drama, and the 
epic. The qualities to which we give the 
names "lyrical," "dramatic," "epic," are 
no less normal and fundamental than 
these three apprehensions of life — as sim- 
ply a present moment, or as a present mo- 
ment in which the past is reaped, or as a 
present moment in which the future is 
promised. 

We are accustomed to say that the lyric 
expresses emotion, with or without an ad- 
mixture of intellectual content; the emo- 
tion is the essential. Emotion, however, 
is the nearest intimation we have of the 
present moment. A man may act, and 
not realize that he has done so until after- 
wards, but he cannot have an emotion 
until he feels it. Yet vivid as is the re- 
sponse to immediate experience in the 
lyric, it is also as transitory as time itself 
— the lyrical is the most evanescent atti- 

[14] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

tude toward life; and as all feeling tends 
to subside after the exciting cause is re- 
moved, so the lyric is the representation of 
a changed and dying feeling. Because 
the emotion is involuntary, its career in 
the poet's spirit will be to a degree a reve- 
lation of his character, and in that revela- 
tion some glimpse of his past and future 
will be involved ; but the emphasis will re- 
main upon the sense of the present, and j 1 
from this flow the lyrical qualities — the 
immediate emotion and its subsiding. 

This transitory nature of feeling has 
troubled both poets and critics, as the pass- 
ing of time troubles every meditative 
spirit, who would make eternal the high 
moments of life. In the lyric to fix the 
most fleeting emotion has seemed impera- 
tive, but how? Many a poet has been dis- 
posed to let the emotion subside into a 
broad generalized frame of mind — into a 

[15] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

reflection or a prophecy — and so rescue a 
permanent lesson from the sinking mood. 
But whether this disposition tactfully in- 
sinuates itself, as in Wordsworth, or 
bluntly obtrudes, as in Longfellow, the 
suspicion grows upon the reader that it is 
a defect of art; the poet's reflection, or 
whatever else he gets from his emotion, is 
likely to be personal and peculiar — more 
and more so as time separates him from 
his audience, for ages differ in their con- 
ventional thoughts more than in their 
feelings. 

Recognizing this difficulty, criticism has 
never agreed with the poets that the eter- 
nity of the lyric should be provided for in 
the end of it, in the more intellectual part ; 
rather, theorists of literature have formu- 
lated a platitude that the lyric is great by 
virtue of elemental, universal emotion. 
This would seem to be, however, a reading 

[16] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

of history into a prudent recipe for fame. 
Unless it is an affectation, the lyric ren- 
ders an emotion truly felt, and this sin- 
cerity of intuition appears to he all that 
the poet can be expected to care about. 
So far as his fame is concerned, the great- 
ness of his poem will depend upon the 
number of men who share his emotion. 
That he ought not to take thought over- 
much, nor choose between emotions even 
if he could, seems proved by the very large 
number of lyrists who have come to their 
own through the belated sympathy of a 
new age, to which they would never have 
appealed had they consulted contempo- 
rary preferences in their emotions. And 
even if the lyric poet has missed fame by 
the singularity of his reactions to experi- 
ence, his work is still recognized as lyrical 
if it have the attitude that responds to life 
always as a rapturous present moment. 

[17] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 
III 

In its unconscious revelation of char- 
acter, every lyric suggests a momentum 
of previous conduct, choices made, habits 
formed ; and to the extent of this implica- 
tion of the past, a lyric is a kind of drama. 
The difference between them is only a 
shifting of emphasis. Every drama is in 
a high sense lyrical, for it must be imag- 
ined as happening in the present; and 
every character in it, supposed to be liv- 
ing in the present, is a lyrical character. 
But the emphasis of the whole is upon the 
past. That the drama is the exhibition of 
human will is true only so far as it ex- 
hibits a harvested past, character return- 
ing upon itself in the guise of fate; for 
if a person in a play should will something 
inconsistent with his known past, or if 
some trick of fortune should release him 

[18] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

from his past, the play would not satisfy 
the dramatic sense. That situation is dra- 
matic which brings men suddenly to ac- 
count, and he who has the eye for drama 
sees in life a perpetual judgment day. 
It is not a matter of analysis, nor of train- 
ing, but of temperament, and therefore 
the young Shakspere, when he writes a 
sonnet-sequence, manages to write a 
drama, and later, when the structure of 
his plays seems premeditated or elabo- 
rated, the complexity can be accounted 
for by the dramatic sense through which 
he apprehends life. There are two plots 
in the Merchant of Venice; how clever 
Shakspere was, say the commentators, 
to join both in one play. But given the 
character of Antonio, the merchant, and 
Shakspere would have been forced to 
invent the equivalents of those two plots, 
if he had not laid hands on them. For An- 

[19] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

tonio is a moody creature, extravagant in 
his generosity, careless and reckless in his 
prejudices. He is a contradiction of him- 
1 self, and his life, viewed dramatically, 
must show the simultaneous reaping of 
his good and bad acts. His insulting 
bravado with Shylock gets him into dan- 
ger, but his loan to Bassanio, the generos- 
ity bound up with the insult and the brav- 
ado, brings Portia to his aid; and when 
the two streams of fate balance, he be- 
comes again what he was before — moody 
and contradictory. 

To say that Shakspere constructed 
this consistency is to forget that without 
such consistency one cannot conceive of 
life as the accomplishment of the past. 
The secret of this harmony of form is not 
in Shakspere's craft, but in his intuition. 
Nor need we attribute to the Greek 
dramatist any particular theory of hered- 

[20] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

ity, if in the (Edipus story the past that is 
reaped extends over two generations. His 
parents grasped at opportunity at all 
costs, and (Edipus inherits their impul- 
siveness, their inability to consider. To 
be sure he is indifferent to the identity of 
the old man he killed on the highway, and 
he risks his life to share the throne of a 
queen whom he does not know and has 
never seen. But only his father would so 
forget his royalty as to quarrel on the 
highway with a young vagabond, and only 
his mother would promise herself indiffer- 
ently to whoever should answer the 
Sphinx. It is the same character in all 
three, and the fault is alike ruinous to all. 
The fact that all three characters sub- 
mit, as it were, to the same judgment day 
and are punished for the same fault, sug- 
gests the observation in passing, that the 
dramatic point of view tends to unify life 

[21] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

at any given moment by discovering in it 
a homogeneous past. Just as the student 
of anatomy sees the passers-by as skele- 
tons, and as the journalist who investi- 
gates graft comes to attribute every defect 
of government to peculation, so the drama- 
tist, studying the past as reaped by one 
person in his play, is likely to attribute a 
similar past to other characters. This 
duplication of theme is so familiar as 
hardly to need illustration. Twelfth 
Night, a love story, shows all its char- 
acters except the clown to be in some stage 
of love; Measure for Measure, similarly, 
exhibits the degrees of the fear of death 
in various natures ; and King Lear studies 
life as a problem of filial relations. The 
significant thing is that this economy of 
situation and theme is not a matter of 
choice or craft with the dramatist, any 
more than the observation of men as skele- 
tal 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

tons is economy of point of view with the 
anatomist; it lies rather in the method or 
means of perception — in the dissective 
eye, and in the dramatic sense. 

The immediate effect, however, of any 
play read or seen, is less logical, less rig- 
idly consistent, because of the lyrical ele- 
ment — the emphasis of the present mo- 
ment in all the characters. If the story 
is to be of value as proving the past, the 
persons must all speak and act conscious 
only of the present, without suspicion that 
they are terms in a demonstration. That 
is, they must act and speak lyrically. Each 
present moment, as it passes through the 
reader's or the spectator's mind, will be 
interesting in proportion to its emotional 
intensity, which is furnished partly by the 
lines, partly by the acting, partly by the 
situation. These all are lyrical elements. 
Situation has nothing to do with the dra- 

[23] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

matic sense, except as it affords char- 
acter an opportunity to display itself; it 
looks to the present, and sometimes to the 
future, but never to the past. How un- 
conscious of the past the acting must be, 
has just been suggested. The lines may 
be very lyrical, as in Romeo and Juliet, 
without much glancing at the dramatic 
drift, or they may be capable of a double 
meaning, lyrical to the speaker and dra- 
matic to his hearers, as in Macbeth. 

The kind of character or emotion re- 
vealed in the lyric, we saw, has been 
thought to have a bearing upon its prob- 
able fame. It is obvious, however, that 
drama may be judged either by the kind 
of emotion, the kind of character exhibited 
— from the standpoint of the actor — or by 
the extent to which the reaping of the past 
is felt. It is a common enough phenom- 
enon of stage history that the popular 

[24] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

favor often leaps to the lyrical side, and 
many a play dramatically bad succeeds 
because it contains some character lyrically 
good. But if the play gives a strong 
enough sense of the past, that is, if the 
characters are consistent with their own 
history, they may be lyrically what they 
please; they must in that case appeal less 
upon the virtue of their emotions than 
upon the justice of their fate. An audi- 
ence will permit the lyric to express only 
such emotions as they at the moment un- 
derstand, but in the drama they will ac- 
cept the emotion tentatively until they see 
what is to become of it. Satan cursing 
God in a lyric will not please the pious, 
who yet would be delighted to see him in 
a drama cursing God and getting pun- 
ished for it. 

The drama has one other lyrical effect, 
in the general emotional tone it conveys. 

[25] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

This tone is serious in proportion as the 
work is felt to be a reaping of the past; 
every judgment day is serious, even if 
we are acquitted. Therefore there is no 
clear line to be drawn between tragedy 
and comedy, for different men and differ- 
ent ages will disagree as to what is seri- 
ous; nor is there any essential difference 
between tragedy and comedy, since a mere 
change of opinion as to what is serious so 
easily converts one into the other. The 
occasion of laughter or merriment in the 
play is from the lyrical part — from the 
speech or the situation or the acting — 
and we enjoy it for the passing moment; 
but every comedy which is really dramatic 
becomes serious with time, as men more 
highly value the sacredness of human na- 
ture. Beatrice and Benedick amuse us 
while they are joking or while others trick 
them, and Petruchio's behavior at his wed- 

[26] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

ding is funny while we hear of it, but in 
so far as we care about those characters, 
such episodes grieve our sense of the dig- 
nity of life. The difference, then, that at 
first sight appears between comedy and 
tragedy depends upon nothing but 
whether we care so little for the charact- 
ers that laughter is adequate armor against 
the judgments they unconsciously pro- 
nounce upon themselves, or whether we 
require a nobler kind of fortitude. 



IV 



The lyric is closer to the drama than to 
the epic, and there are fewer epics than 
either lyrics or dramas. The reason is 
probably that a sense of the future — the 
ability to see life as a prospect of destiny — 
is far rarer than a sense of the past, to 
say nothing of the immediate sense of the 

[27] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

present, and it seems to have always some- 
thing of the miraculous in it. If each mo- 
ment can be seen as a harvest of previous 
moments, there is every logical reason why 
the interest of the present should be the J 
future it promises; but only men of un- 
usual faith have risen to this logic, and 
even they felt the promise of destiny more 
as a gift from a superior being than as a 
consequence of the present. Indeed, where 
the promise reveals itself to a nature of 
great optimism, it often takes the form of 
strong contrast with things as they are, 
and the lyrical and the epical moods in 
the poem are almost miraculously contra- 
dictory. iEneas is humanly weak, his ex- 
pedition but a frail band to make certain 
the destiny of Rome; the poet intends us 
to set the lyrical mood of the hero — regret, 
reluctance, even terror — over against the 
majesty of the imperial doom he served. 

[28] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

It is a contrast, not a consequence; or if a 
consequence, then too much a thing of 
wonder for the logic of normal man. 

A more superficial reason has usually 
been given for the small number of epics 
in literature, especially for the total dis- 
appearance of the genre in modern times. 
It is said that every epic must have a plot 
in heaven, working itself out in human for- 
tunes on earth, because the epic exhibits 
divine will, as the drama exhibits the will 
of man; and since we no longer have a 
well-peopled anthropomorphic heaven, we 
can no longer show the gods plotting there. 
But to say that the epic exhibits divine will 
is only to say that it gives the sense of des- 
tiny, the feeling of guidance to an end. 
Why cannot men express such a feeling 
without a scene on Olympus? The gods 
and goddesses of the old epics were but 
part of the language with which the epic 

[29] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

feeling was expressed; they are no more 
essential to the rendering of that sense 
than the kings and queens of the old plays 
are essential to the drama. If only we 
had an epic to express, we could make the 
language for it. But, say the historians, 
the epic has always dealt with a world 
crisis, involving a higher and a lower civ- 
ilization ; how can we have this large kind 
of poetry again until we have another 
great crisis ? If the historian be American, 
he often concludes by wondering why the 
Civil War, so easily comparable to that of 
Troy, never found its Homer. Yet these 
explanations, and the description of the 
epic implied in them, are not sufficiently 
searching. The world crisis which is clear 
enough now in the iEneid was probably 
not clear until Virgil made it so, and 
whether he believed in the mythology and 
the heaven he wrote of, made no difference 

[30] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 



o us. 
itutle 
2nt a \ 



poetically to him, and makes none to us 
The essence of the epic is that attitude 
toward life which sees in the moment 
destined future. This attitude in no sense 
is conditioned by acquaintance with Greek 
theology, nor by use of classical hexam- 
eters, nor by division into a certain num- 
ber of books, nor by any other accident of 
form. It may invest itself with each or 
all of these circumstances, but they are 
not essential to it. The epic attitude in 
Don Quixote, without aid of gods in a 
heavenly plot, exhibits itself in that pa- 
thetic brooding upon the destiny of Spain 
of which the great novel is eloquent. The 
epic attitude in the Song of Roland is like- 
wise not a matter of celestial furniture, nor 
of Greek or Roman verse, but a matter, as 
Gaston Paris said, of love for an idealized 
France, for the country which seemed the 
appointed champion-in-arms of Christen- 

[31] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

dom. The epic attitude in the work of 
Victor Hugo, another but a similar 
idealization of France, is not completely 
expressed in one of his writings, but dif- 
fused through all of them. That the Don 
should be shipwrecked by the actual facts 
of life, or that Roland should be slain by 
the Saracens, diminishes as little from the 
sense of destiny as that Aeneas should 
sometimes be frightened. The Aeneid and 
the Song of Roland and Don Quixote are 
the work of men who conceived of their 
race as serving a prospect of fate. With- 
out this attitude no epic is possible. 

If literature is now comparatively bar- 
ren of this kind of poetry, may it not be 
because this age, in spite of much theoriz- 
ing, has no confidence as to what its des- 
tiny may be? It is not that we have lost 
the gods. If we no longer have Milton's 
celestial personages and geography, we 

[32] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

have the idea of evolution, which ought to 
give the strongest possihle conviction of 
our future. But evolution, whether in the 
hands of the literary historian or in those 
of the scientist, has been exclusively occu- 
pied in clarifying and reinforcing our 
sense of the past ; it has not even suggested 
whither we are bound. No wonder that 
its chief service has been to the drama, 
which with a new, scientific confidence now 
shows us the inevitability of one moment 
upon the next, the sins of the fathers vis- 
ited mathematically upon the children ; no 
wonder that with this rejuvenated day of 
judgment perpetually before us, our 
drama is dark and tragic, and deals, how- 
ever wholesomely, with our worse selves. 
The beast we were, constantly returns to 
bear witness against the man we think we 
are. 

Exactly what sort of epic we shall have 

[33] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

when science becomes once more prospec- 
tive and hopeful it is hardly worth while 
to guess, but the permanent traits of the 
genre are fairly clear. Just as the lyric 
enters into the drama, so the drama enters 
into epic; for a sense of destiny involves 
some guidance out of the past and the 
present, the direction of to-morrow being 
found as it were by the two points of to- 
day and yesterday. To the ancient mind 
all this meant simply the will of the gods, 
within such limits as the gods were free; 
therefore a drama was enacted in heaven 
reaping the past of the divinities, and that 
harvest became on earth man's fate. To 
state it another way, man would be most 
devout, most ready to attribute his future 
to the past of the gods, at those moments 
of history when he felt himself in a world- 
current of destiny. Tasso and Milton felt 
such prophetic influences, though they sub- 

[34] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

stituted the Christian heaven and divinities 
for the pagan. And however the future 
poet creates new imagery or modifies the 
old, he will keep unchanged the soul of the 
epic — the prospect of the race ; and in this 
prospect will remain, if only in a diffused 
state, a dramatic consciousness of the past 
from which it grew. 

The lyric also enters into the epic, not 
only as it is included in the heavenly 
drama, but throughout the poem — most 
obviously in the character of the hero, 
upon whom the will of the gods falls. 
Here again the poem may be judged by 
the lyric impression — by the behavior of 
the hero. Such a standard, however, 
leaves us disappointed with most epics. 
For it is to the poet's advantage to mini- 
mize the strength of the hero and magnify 
his obedience, in order that the power of 
destiny on him may seem irresistible; 

[35] 



THE KINDS OF POETKY 

otherwise the poet may find he has written 
not epic but drama. It is best rather to 
judge a poem by the quality that distin- 
guishes its genre. The test of the epic 
attitude is in the consistency of its sense 
of an inexorable future — which is quite 
apart from its lyrical excellences. 

Finally, the epic, like the drama, has a 
total lyric aspect, as naturally hopeful as 
the sense of the past is naturally serious. 
No matter how somber the incidents or 
the situation, they are in the epic but op- 
portunities for the display of destiny; 
every moment promises a new beginning. 
For an epic to be pessimistic is a paradox, 
and indicates a confusion in the poet's view 
of life. 



If these definitions of the kinds of poetry 

36] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

are just, tney would seem to open for the 
student of literature, if he so desires, a 
new field besides that of language in which 
to apply the principle of evolution. The 
changes that can be traced in literary his- 
tory are changes not of poetry nor of its 
kinds, but of the spiritual ideals, the so- 
cial conventions and proprieties, the po- 
litical conditions, which at any given time 
are as it were the raw material of litera- 
ture; and in this material some principle 
of evolution may perhaps be found. For 
example, the history of English drama, 
if drama is the sense of the past called to 
judgment, should study the changes in the 
English conception of what is a test of 
character. The Elizabethan stage dealt 
with situations of great adventure — with 
murders, shipwrecks, plots, and surprises ; 
whereas the modern play usually prefers 
a test of character taken from an ordered, 

[37] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

quiet life. Evidently there has been a 
change in the English ideal of success and 
failure. It will not do to assume that the 
nature of drama has changed, nor even 
that the process of time has made the mod- 
ern play more dramatic; Lear and Mac- 
beth and Othello hold their own by any 
definitions. But it is illuminating to re- 
member that the successful man, in the 
Renaissance ideal, was one who could cope 
with every public or private emergency. 
It was not enough that he should be mor- 
ally good — a beggar might be that ; but he 
— and the women as well — must have the 
varied efficiency of gentlefolk born to a 
career. Viola, Portia, Orlando meet 
emergencies with success; Hamlet and 
Othello do not. The modern playwright, 
however, would be most unlikely to rep- 
resent any of these excellent persons as 
tragic victims, because the modern ideal 

[38] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

of success is a matter of living, as it were, 
on the defensive, not by rising to extraor- 
dinary accomplishment, but by avoiding 
such errors as later may embarrass us ; our 
typical tragedy shows some weakness over- 
taking us in the very routine of our exist- 
ence. Between this idea of failure and the 
Elizabethan, there is a change that can- 
not be understood without the historian's 
help; and there are similar changes, call- 
ing for similar help, in the crude material 
that has gone into lyrics and epics. If the 
study of these changes is not specifically 
the study of poetry, at least it is the study 
of man's way of accounting for himself to 
himself — not an ignoble study; and its 
effect would be to show the roots of 
poetry in life, by illuminating man's 
eternal effort to restate life so that it will 
satisfy him, and the eternal moods through 
which the eternal effort is made. 

[39] 



THE TEACHING OF 
POETRY 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 



IF we are teachers of poetry, it is the 
love of poetry, one may suppose, that 
made us so. At some critical moment 
of childhood or youth we may have taken 
down from the shelves of the library at 
home what seemed a chance volume — but 
it was our fate in our hands. We opened 
at random at that sparse distribution of 
type down the center of the page which 
we knew signified verse. What good 
angel bade us read ? A cadence, an image, 
a line — and poetry was born in us, the 
singing heart, the divine homesickness and 

[43] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

the growing wings, the enchanted mad- 
ness, sudden and beautiful and incurable 
beyond other kinds of falling in love. 

For me poetry began with three and a 
half lines from the Idyls of the King. So 
vivid was the experience that I still see 
just where the words stood on the page, 
and just how the afternoon sun streamed 
through the window, and how the old 
green-bound copy of Tennyson was trans- 
figured as I read — 

"Long stood Sir Bedivere 
Revolving many memories, till the hull 
Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn, 
And on the mere the wailing died away." 

My father came into the room, I remem- 
ber, and I read out the lines to him. He 
agreed that they were admirable, but to 
my surprise he did not find them momen- 
tous. 

[44] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

Or if no verses awakened us, perhaps 
some heaven-sent teacher brought to mind 
our heritage in Tennyson or Shelley, in 
Wordsworth or Milton, in Keats or Spen- 
ser; heaven-sent he seems to us now, 
though his pedagogy was nothing more 
than drawing aside the forgetfulness that 
veiled our better selves from us, and his 
"insights," as we called them, into the mas- 
ters were but naming over the things we 
too in a groping way liked best. He did 
not introduce, he restored us, to poetry. 
And other beginnings in poetry — second- 
ary beginnings, they might be called — we 
owe to teachers of literature in school and 
college, whose chance or intended allusions 
to vital things in books and to ideal things 
in life lighted up beauty by the way. To 
give a list of such allusions would furnish 
no clue to their importance, for even at 
the time they seemed casual, and memory 

[45] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

holds them without much contact or re- 
lation to each other ; but they made poetry- 
more intelligible and more lovable. I 
think, for example, of a lecture in my 
freshman year in which a comparison was 
made between Lowell and Matthew Arn- 
old. One poet-critic, I forget which, was 
the subject of the lecture, and the other 
was brought in, perhaps on the moment's 
inspiration, for a natural contrast be- 
tween English and American contempo- 
raries; but it was the contrast, however 
incidental, that won my affection for both 
writers. I think also of a lecture on Shel- 
ley and one on Milton, in which the splen- 
did reading of well-chosen passages made 
the poets live. Such moments of dawn 
or starlight never cease altogether for the 
poetry lover, though the glamour is on the 
earliest. Gratitude prefers not to dis- 
criminate among them. Should I be more 

[46] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

grateful to that Lowell- Arnold talk, which 
came first, or to some wonderful lectures 
on Virgil, which I can hardly expect to 
hear bettered? Did I gain more from 
reading those lines in the Passing of Ar- 
thur, which were for me the doorway to 
poetry, or from reading Plato's Sym- 
posium, which was the house itself? 

The desire to teach poetry then, as I 
understand it, is the desire to provide 
others with just such new-births into the 
world of imagination as we have received 
from books and from instructors. Teach- 
ing poetry, in this sense, is not teaching 
meter or verse forms, nor even teaching 
the subject-matter of poems; it is the mul- 
tiplying of those fortunate moments when 
the soul is dilated and the universe en- 
larged. We may conclude that graduate 
students have in mind a failure to provide 
such moments for them when they com- 

[47] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

plain, as they sometimes do, that the course 
leading to the doctorate does not lead them 
to poetry. 

But when we start out to teach poetry 
in our own enlightened way, we soon fall 
into a suspicion that it cannot be taught at 
all. We begin with an exuberant purpose 
to reproduce our good fortune in the lives 
of others, to give them the books that 
helped us, and to imitate for their benefit 
the inspiring insights of our masters; but 
somehow the magic illusion does not get 
created. We call the attention of our stu- 
dents to the passage from Tennyson which 
first was poetry to us, but our students 
see nothing in it but Tennyson ; and as for 
imitating our former teachers, even our 
colleagues look at us with pity when we 
try to explain the secrets of the priceless 
instruction we once sat under. In a dark 

moment we recall that many of our class- 
es] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

mates came away from that lecture on 
Lowell-Arnold, or from that on Virgil, 
untouched by any gleam. These minis- 
trations, we come to fear, are like other 
service of the spirit, too personal, too much 
indebted to the place and the hour, for 
any one to make them his profession. We 
may in a sense teach literature, but not 
poetry, we fear. We may lecture on the 
contributing circumstances of literary pro- 
duction, on the language, on the lives of 
the authors; but for poetry, we fear, for 
the spark from heaven, the student like 
the scholar gypsy must wait, and we half 
believe with the scholar gypsy that he had 
better wait outside our class. 

We are not likely to agree on any ad- 
vice for teaching poetry until we have dis- 
posed of this primary discouragement. 
Yet though the discouragement is so gen- 
eral, we ought to dispose of it easily. For 

[49] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

we know there are many successful teach- 
ers of poetry; almost every college has 
one at some time or other — usually all the 
time. Though most of us found our first 
love of poetry in a hook, it was probably 
an inspiring teacher who gave us our sec- 
ond love of it, and sent us to the univers- 
ity. If only a rare man could be found 
whose pupils became poetry lovers, we 
might well call him a genius, and give up 
hope ; but since there are a number of such 
teachers, why should we think their equip- 
ment or their success beyond our imita- 
tion? The cause of our discouragement is 
that we try to reproduce for our students 
the exact conditions of our own initiation ; 
we would have them admire the same pas- 
sages in the same poems, and we even at- 
tempt to repeat the mannerisms and the 
very words of our teachers. But allow- 
ing for every variation of temperament in 

[50] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

teachers and students, and for the acci- 
dents of time and of locality, we may yet 
hope to teach poetry without a too terrify- 
ing dependence on the spark from heaven. 
To a certain extent we may even cultivate 
those apparently magical insights into lit- 
erature. Very simply, we may observe 
and imitate what the successful teachers 
of poetry have in common. What is their 
purpose in teaching poetry? What pe- 
culiarities are discoverable in their equip- 
ment? 



II 



The office of the teacher of poetry is 
easily defined; it is to afford a mediation 
between great poets and their audience. 
For the most part the poets addressed 
themselves to their contemporaries with- 
out suspecting they would ever need in- 

[51] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

xerpretation. Certain youthful ones, like 
the Spenser of the Shepherd's Calendar, 
may have annotated their works in ad- 
vance, but there is no evidence that even 
they looked forward with pleasure to be- 
ing lectured on by college professors. Yet 
even for the most direct poets time has 
gradually obscured the meaning, by 
changing the language or by dropping out 
some of the environment which made the 
book pertinent. With every year a gulf 
widens between the book and its reader. 
The office of the teacher of literature, 
then, is to supply the information, the 
background, whatever is lacking to make 
the reader at home with the book. 

But if we are to explain any of the past, 
we shall need to know all of it, at least 
as much as possible; we must draw on 
more than one kind of record, on history 
and philosophy as well as on fiction and 

[521 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

imaginative writing. Perhaps even so 
we shall not be able to recover the past; 
but if the whole record is not sufficient, a 
part of it certainly will not be. It is no 
accident that the successful teachers of lit- 
erature have usually been students of phil- 
osophy or of history or of both, and if we 
wish to imitate them, our first step must 
be to broaden our definition of literature 
until it includes not only poetry and the 
novel, essays and drama, but also the mas- 
terpieces of biography and other forms of 
history, of philosophy, and of science. If 
such a counsel of indiscrimination is sur- 
prising, we should observe that here is no 
advice to teach history or to teach phil- 
osophy ; it may be plain in a moment that 
such services are quite distinct from teach- 
ing poetry. The advice is rather to con- 
sider all masterpieces of expression as 
literature, as poetry if you wish — capable 

[53] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

of giving us that new birth of the imagi- 
nation which we defined as the experience 
of poetry — whether they happen to deal 
with an emotional dream, or with the an- 
nals of a nation, or with abstract enquiry. 
If even in this form the advice is puzzling, 
it is so only because we are students of 
English literature. We inherit the un- 
enviable distinction of having put poetry 
off into a corner, and of treating with con- 
tempt those other and inseparable records 
on which poetry often depends. No such 
advice would surprise us were we students 
of Greek letters, nor would the advice be 
needed; for the classical scholar, so far as 
I know, has never omitted Aristotle or 
Plato or Thucydides or Herodotus from 
his canon of literature, any more than the 
French student has omitted Descartes or 
Rousseau or Voltaire. Both the classical 
and the French students, therefore, have 

[54] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

the advantage of studying, along with 
poetry, a body of facts and a body of ideas 
which often determine the inspiration of 
poems. In teaching English we do some- 
times talk of the ideas of evolution in In 
Memoriam, but we ignore those predeces- 
sors of Darwin whom Tennyson studied, 
and Darwin himself, of course, we do not 
read. If it be urged that he did not write 
with felicity, and therefore deserves to be 
counted out of literature, what shall be said 
of Hobbes and Locke, of Berkeley and 
Hume, or how shall we dispose of such an 
historian as Gibbon ? The offerings in col- 
lege courses would indicate that these writ- 
ers are none of them considered germane 
to the study of literature, not to say the 
study of poetry. 

The narrow definition of poetry which 
excludes prose, and the narrow definition 
of literature which excludes history and 

[55] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

philosophy, are in a sense novelties with 
us. When Sidney defended poetry, he 
understood within the term the parables 
of Christ and the dialogues of Plato; of 
verse writing by itself he said little. When 
Milton wrote of his ambition to be a poet, 
it was metrical composition that he had in 
mind, but his definition did not preclude 
the most austere of philosophic subjects. 
Shelley in his beautiful essay, itself a 
poem, resumed Sidney's large outlook, 
and wrote of poetry as of a way of appre- 
hending all phases of life, even in prose. 
We may say broadly that the sixteenth, 
the seventeenth and the eighteenth cen- 
turies in England defined poetry as the 
French or the classical reader would define 
it, and that even in the nineteenth century 
large-natured critics who had the best of 
their training from the century before, 
took this just view of literature. But with 

[56] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

the romantic movement came an emphasis 
upon feeling as opposed to thought, and 
therefore on the literature of the emotions 
as opposed to the literature of reason. To 
the exponents of this school it does not 
seem to have occurred that reason can it- 
self be the object of passion, or the cause 
of it; on the contrary, the mathematical 
conceptions of a Newton were relegated by 
the new literary taste to the limbo of "cold 
thought," whereas a primrose by a river's 
brim became the occasion for poetic tem- 
perature and the summons to poetic medi- 
tation. 

The formal doctrine that only those 
books are literature which have to do 
somewhat exclusively with the emotions, 
was set forth in De Quincey's half forgot- 
ten yet too typical letter on the literature 
of knowledge and the literature of power. 
Knowledge was once thought to be power, 

[57] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

but De Quincey did not think so. "The 
antithesis of literature," he says, "is books 
of knowledge. . . . All that is literature 
seeks to communicate power; all that is 
not literature, to communicate knowl- 
edge." What does he mean by power? 
Power is the awakening in us of emotional 
aptitudes or forces which we were not 
previously aware of — a definition wide 
enough to be harmless, except that the ro- 
manticist could not imagine his heart so 
fluttered by an accession of knowledge. 
"If it be asked," he says, "what is meant 
by communicating power, I in my turn 
would ask by what name a man would 
designate the case in which I should be 
made to feel vividly, and with a vital con- 
sciousness, emotions which ordinary life 
rarely or never supplies occasion for ex- 
citing, and which had previously lain un- 
awakened and hardly within the dawn of 

[58] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

consciousness." Those books, then, which 
stir the emotion and dilate the imagina- 
tion — books like The English Mail Coach 
— belong to literature ; whereas books like 
Gibbon's history, since they supply us with 
knowledge rather than with emotion, are 
not literature, but the antithesis of it. 

It is hardly worth the time to argue 
with De Quincey, who nowadays has be- 
come the mere shell of an author, a stylistic 
ghost. His theory in itself might even be 
considered unobjectionable, so long as it 
is not applied to any particular book. But 
unfortunately his point of view has pre- 
vailed, to the harm of our teaching of lit- 
erature. In many colleges to this day the 
formula survives that the nineteenth cen- 
tury was a well of true poetry, whereas 
the eighteenth century was an arid discip- 
line of rhetoric — that the English imagi- 
nation slept fitfully through a nightmare 

[59] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

of suffocation in Dryden, Pope and Gray, 
and awoke with deep breaths of gratitude 
for being alive in Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge, even in Leigh Hunt. The eigh- 
teenth century has become a mystic term 
of reproach, which like some other mystic 
things, will not bear looking into. If we 
are thoroughgoing romanticists we re- 
move from the century any writers who 
do not illustrate our conception of it. 
"The eighteenth century," we say "was a 
period of rhetoric and cold facts, wherein 
poetry and imagination were dead. Wil- 
liam Collins, however, Chatterton, Blake, 
Burns, Thomson, and Cowper, really be- 
long to the nineteenth century; it is only 
by an accident that they lived in the eigh- 
teenth. It is only by an accident also that 
Addison's discussion of Paradise Lost and 
Warton's Observations on the Faerie 
Queene appeared when they did. We 

[60] 



/ 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

know this is so, because the eighteenth cen- 
tury did not care for imaginative poetry." 
If we are fond of Wordsworth, it is with 
reluctance that we admit he owed some- 
thing to Pope. If we admit any merit in 
Pope, we probably concede it to The Rape 
of the Lock, a poem which could have 
taught Wordsworth little; but we balk at 
the Essay on Man, though it is not more 
didactic than The Excursion, and cer- 
tainly is clearer and shorter. We may be 
persuaded to approve even the Essay on 
Man, but beyond this we absolutely will 
not go ; here we take our stand on the last 
perilous edge of literature; we will not 
drop into the chasm of knowledge. The 
invitation comes to us in the suggestion 
that for the ideas of his essay Pope drew 
on Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, and in- 
indirectly on Liebnitz; and to read those 
gentlemen might help us to understand 

[61] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

the essay. But why understand it any 
better ? We reflect that we are far enough 
away from poetry as it is. 

Perhaps it is time for me to say that I 
hold no special brief for Pope nor for the 
eighteenth century, nor do I fail to admire 
the greatness of the romantic poets. What 
the lover of poetry must hold a brief for 
is the truth that each generation gets its 
poetic thrill out of slightly different 
images and suggestions, and it is imperti- 
nent for any age to conclude that its par- 
ticular way of enjoying poetry is the only 
right one. If I found poetry first in a 
bit of romantic suggestion in Tennyson, 
naturally I am not the less grateful to the 
romantic method. But other people have 
made their discovery of poetry in such 
lines of Pope's as, 

"Act well your part; there all the honor lies," 

[62] 



THE TEACHING OP POETRY 

or even in passages still more practical 
and informing. If we are to teach all of 
poetry rather than some particular school, 
we must recognize that those insights, 
those enlarged moments of the soul, which 
we agreed it is the ohject of poetry to im- 
part, can be found by different readers in 
different authors. With that variety of 
taste it would be useless as well as imper- 
tinent to interfere. Falling in love, in 
poetry as elsewhere, is an invariable ex- 
perience, universally understood; but as 
to the object which caused the excitement, 
there is no need to agree. 

On this general ground we might w r ell 
plead that the more intellectual kinds of 
writing should be restored to our defini- 
tion of poetry. But there is also a special 
reason, which even the most romantic 
teachers of poetry now admit. The ten- 
dency to neglect as unpoetic all writers 

[63] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

who are given to vigorous intellectual 
processes, who really think, and to praise 
exclusively those who appeal to our emo- 
tions, has largely destroyed the ability to 
read. A serious poet to-day, with an idea 
as well as an emotion, faces a hospitable 
but an incapacitated audience. It has be- 
come almost an unfair question to ask 
poetry lovers just what their favorite 
poems mean, for poetry, by romantic defi- 
nition and by assiduous practice, has be- 
come an emotional experience without co- 
herent meaning. The ill effects of such a 
definition have been progressive. Those 
who refused to grapple with the not very 
profound argument of Pope soon found it 
inconvenient to follow the argument in 
Wordsworth or in Tennyson or in Brown- 
ing. A few years ago a stand was made 
against this increasing reluctance to know 
what poetry specifically means, and now 

[64] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

a wholesome reaction is well started, but 
for the moment there was much bandying 
about of the phrase "teaching ideas in lit- 
erature," as though to stress ideas were to 
inject into literature a foreign or novel ele- 
ment. All that the phrase actually stood 
for was a return of the sane conviction 
that, provided one cares deeply for the 
things of the intellect, ideas are proper 
subjects for emotion and therefore for 
poetry, and that those writers who express 
intelligible ideas should be intelligently 
appreciated, over and above whatever 
emotional power their art may afford. 
The reaction is now so far advanced that 
we need not forfeit our reputation as lov- 
ers of poetry if we insist on knowing just 
what Shelley means in certain portions, 
let us say, of the Prometheus Unbound, 
or of the Epipsy chid ion; nor are we lost 
if we conclude that Shelley did not always 

[65] 



THE KINDS OF POETKY 

know what he meant. We need not be 
deaf to his superb music; we need not 
deny that for those moods which are satis- 
fied by pure music he is always adequate ; 
nor need we be blind to the noble intel- 
lectual designs that usually do clarify his 
profuse emotion. We need but discrimi- 
nate honestly between his merits and his 
shortcomings, between his moments of 
thought and his moments of uncontrolled 
feeling; so shall we deserve the confidence 
of those willing students who try to like 
him, since he is a famous poet, but who 
cannot see at all times what his poetry is 
about. 

Ill 

As soon as we have convinced ourselves 
that our definition of literature should in- 
clude history and philosophy, there is dan- 
fee] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

ger that we may become teachers of his- 
tory or teachers of philosophy, rather than 
teachers of literature. We are most likely 
to become historians. There is of course 
no objection to teaching history; the only 
question is whether by so doing we are 
not departing from our first ambition to 
confer on others our love of poetry. We 
should observe that the teaching of litera- 
ture as history differs radically from the 
use of history to understand literature. 
It is true, of course, that poetry is a rec- 
ord of thoughts and feelings, and that we 
may try, if we wish, to trace the develop- 
ment of culture in English poetry from 
Beowulf to Blake. But there are grave 
difficulties in the way, and even if the per- 
formance were easy, there would be noth- 
ing in it to make one necessarily a lover 
of poetry, any more than Gibbon's mas- 
terly summarizing of theological creeds 

[67] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

would make converts to them. And even 
from the historical point of view, poetry 
is dangerous material from which to 
recover the visage of the past. In pro- 
portion to the completeness with which it 
reflects life, it is a mirror for every age to 
see itself in, but we do not look into mir- 
rors to see the person who was there be- 
fore us. The great poets capture a whole 
field of vision, though focusing on only a 
part of it; we can find in the picture, as 
we can find in life, many details that never 
interested them. In this inclusiveness the 
poet, unlike the philosopher or the his- 
torian, is often more profound than he 
intended to be. Reflecting on this fact, 
we may be chary of ascribing to any poet, 
or to his age, the things in his works that 
are precious to us. Nothing in recent 
years, for example, has probably been 
more satisfying to lovers of poetry than 

[68] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

the revival of interest in Euripides among 
English readers — a revival brought about 
largely by the genius and the enthusiasm 
of Professor Gilbert Murray. But along 
with this appreciation of the noble poetry, 
perhaps finally to undermine that appre- 
ciation, if we only knew, has gone much 
emphasis upon the modern note in Euri- 
pides — upon his foreknowledge, as it were, 
of the problems that distress our age. Be- 
yond question it is possible to quote from 
him passages strangely apposite to con- 
temporary themes, yet it does not follow 
that he had any more understanding of 
our times than other poets equally great, 
or that his message is more intimate for 
us than it was for men a hundred years 
ago. It is Professor Murray who belongs 
to our age; to say that Euripides is mod- 
ern may well be only an awkward and mis- 
leading way of registering his immortality, 

[69] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

his capacity for being interpreted to any 
age. Though we can find our thoughts 
expressed in him, we hardly need to revise 
our notion of the Greeks, so as to attribute 
our thoughts to them. In some cases the 
contemporary note is palpable luck. 
When the old nurse, trying to persuade 
Hippolytus to love Phaedra, remarks that 
Aphrodite is a beautiful goddess, univer- 
sally worshipped among men, the youth, 
who is devoted to Artemis, answers that 
what god one worships is a matter of 
taste. Does the reply sound sophisticated, 
disillusioned? Perhaps it is so to readers 
at least tentatively monotheistic, but noth- 
ing could be more sensibly pious on the 
lips of a youth like Hippolytus, who had a 
number of gods to choose from. 

If poetry has the faculty of reflecting 
various meanings, of expressing the reader 
quite as much as it expresses the writer, 

[70] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 



and if for that reason it is dangerous ma- 
terial with which to teach history, for the 
same reason it is an unsafe vehicle for the 
teaching of philosophy. Here also we 
should observe that the teaching of litera- 
ture as philosophy differs radically from 
the use of philosophy to understand litera- 
ture. When we would appreciate the 
Essay on Man, there is an advantage in 
knowing Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, 
just as there is an advantage in knowing 
the early theories of evolution when we 
would read In Memoriam; if it was an 
idea that stirred the poet's emotion, per- 
haps we must understand the idea before 
the same emotion will be stirred in us. 
But there is a world of difference between 
emotional contact with an idea and philo- 
sophic control of it. Certain ideas, the 
denial of the old-fashioned kind of im- 
mortality, for example, produced a mo- 

[71] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

mentous effect on Tennyson, leaving him 
perplexed and wrought; in time he got 
used to his perplexities, without solving 
any of them, and he had the genius to give 
us a faithful record of his doubts, just as 
they beset him, and a faithful record of 
his getting used to them. There may be 
a philosophy in the writers he had been 
reading, who produced this effect upon 
him, but there is no philosophy in In Me- 
moriam, no system of thought, only a series 
of emotional reactions to ideas. Those in- 
defatigable commentators who still ap- 
proach the poem in the faith that Tenny- 
son, being a good poet, ought to have a 
sound theology, are sore put to it to fur- 
nish him out of their own philosophies 
with even a patched-up and dubitable sys- 
tem. Desiring to get a precise transla- 
tion of what the poet by his own account 
only vaguely felt, they must wrangle for- 

[72] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

ever as to just what was intended by 
"Strong son of God, immortal love," at 
one end of the poem, or by "One far off 
divine event," at the other. The question 
would be a fair one to ask of a philoso- 
pher, but it is an unfair one to ask of a 
poet who for the moment records not ideas 
but the distress produced by them. Even 
when the poet is intentionally philosophi- 
cal, as Pope is in his Essay, or — to take a 
great example at once — as Lucretius is in 
his epic of nature, there is something more 
permanent in him than the philosophy; 
there is what we call poetry, that kindling 
of the heart and the imagination which 
philosophy may be the cause of, but which 
is not philosophy. It is to this that we 
first gave our devotion, and it is this we 
desire to teach. 

We cannot make the distinction too 
clear. Instead of teaching poetry as 

[73] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

though it were history or as though 
it were philosophy, we need to draw 
on history and philosophy in order to 
understand poetry. History is a large 
word. It means all that is necessary for 
us to know before we can be contemporary 
with a poem. To read Chaucer with every 
advantage, we must recover as far as pos- 
sible the frame of mind which the men of 
his time brought to their acquaintance with 
his work. We must know their language, 
their political, social and other opinions, 
their attitude toward life and toward 
poetry in general, and their prejudice for 
or against the poet. All the scholarship 
needed for this recovery of Chaucer's time 
may be conceived of as history, whether it 
involves learning biographical facts or 
learning a language. Study of this kind 
is the only magic to change us into a con- 
temporary of any remote writer, if that be 

[74] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

at all possible. We often think the change 
costs more than it is worth; we are espe- 
cially rebellious when a language has to 
be mastered, merely to read a poet whom 
we may not care for, after all. So un- 
popular has language study become, that 
the entire moral responsibility for it will 
shortly rest on heartless graduate faculties. 
But this ought not to surprise us in an 
era when it has been considered no han- 
dicap to a reader not to know just what 
his favorite poet means. For many of us, 
of course, philology in the narrow sense 
may never prove alluring ; at most it may 
be for us only a limited approach to 
poetry. But some knowledge of language 
is obligatory if we are to make any com- 
parative study of literature, whether we 
compare the poets of our own race in dif- 
ferent centuries, or the poets of different 
races in our own time ; and we would prob- 

[75] 






THE KINDS OF POETRY 

ably admit that without some comparison 
of poetry the teaching of it can hardly get 
far. The summons to be contemporary, 
to study the poetry of our own time and 
our own country, is a gallant encourage- 
ment to be self-reliant, to stand on our 
feet, as Emerson and Whitman invited us 
to do. Besides, the invitation excuses us 
from learning Anglo-Saxon, or German, 
or French, or Latin or Greek. Yet what 
an unimaginative love of poetry that 
would be, which could be satisfied to rest 
on one time or in one place! Whoever 
got his first love of poetry from a strictly 
contemporary poem? It was the quick- 
ening of imagination in us that made the 
experience poetic, and imagination rarely 
gets its first quickening from what is close 
at hand. Whether we read back into time, 
or crosswise into foreign literature of our 
own day, some arduous study of language, 

[76] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

of all that we have called history, and some 
effort of imagination, must he undertaken 
before we are neighbor to the poet whose 
works we hope to understand. 

If the historical approach to literature 
is unpopular, perhaps the teachers of lit- 
erature are themselves to blame. It is so 
easy to teach history instead of poetry; 
it is so natural to assume that these his- 
torical matters on which we spend so much 
study have to do, not only with the ap- 
proach to poetry, but also with poetry 
itself. The whole service of history, how- 
ever, is but to make us contemporary with 
the author. Once become contemporary, 
we are in no better position than any other 
readers who are about to make the ac- 
quaintance of a new poem. When we are 
finally at home in Chaucer's age, we face 
there the same problems of appreciation 
and criticism as we face when we read 

[77] 



THE KINDS OF POETKY 

verse in the morning paper. Does the 
poem thrill us? Why? Is it a good 
poem? Why? The study of history 
merely postpones these elementary ques- 
tions ; it never can answer them. The fact 
that Chaucer derived his plots from Boc- 
caccio or from some one else, and the fact 
that his language evolved largely from 
the Anglo-Saxon or is recruited from the 
French, can have no hearing on the value 
of his work as poetry. No matter how far 
scholarship retreats into history, it is still 
backing away from those simple questions 
that baffled the critics of Fannie's First 
Play. 

The young lover of poetry, recalling 
that he found his most beautiful experi- 
ence in some lines the author and date of 
which he perhaps did not know, is natur- 
ally wary of the unconscious tendency to 

substitute historical information for liter- 
Era] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

ary insight. He observes that the purely 
historical approach is helpless in dealing 
with a poem just written — worse than 
helpless, for it often tries to operate 
blithely where there is no history. I once 
heard a great philologian tell a young poet 
that his lyric just published in a magazine 
was one of the most admirable poems in 
American literature. The happy author 
asked wherein this excellence had been no- 
ticed, and the scholar replied with enthusi- 
asm that every word in the lyric was of 
Anglo-Saxon origin. I still see the look 
on the poet's face. Only a few months ago 
we were reading a description of a well 
known school of English teaching. The 
description was seriously intended and en- 
tirely laudatory; it set forth an ideal. 
"In its literary studies," we read, this 
school "aims to get at the bottom of things, 
to explain relations, to trace an author in 

[79] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

his borrowings, to lay bare the influence 
under which he wrote. To mere esthetic 
evaluation it turns a deaf ear." In other 
words, the merit of this way of teaching 
literature is that it attends exclusively to 
the historical approach, and resolutely de- 
clines to consider what the poet and his 
readers are primarily interested in — the 
effect produced by the poem itself. It is 
a natural and fortunate instinct of the stu- 
dent, who still remembers his genuine con- 
tacts with poetry, to protect himself 
against this theory of teaching. Unhap- 
pily the student often protects himself too 
much, failing to see the immense impor- 
tance of historical investigation properly 
employed, as a means of becoming con- 
temporary with old poets. 

When the historian stands helpless at 
last before the poem itself, the philosopher 
comes to his rescue. To criticize a poem 

[80] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

written yesterday or tills morning, one 
needs not a record but a theory of life. 
We pass judgment immediately on our 
neighbor's actions, on his thoughts and 
emotions, without going into his biog- 
raphy. An account of his life might in- 
deed affect our opinion of his morals or 
his motives, but his acts themselves we 
judge by our own scale of values. Poetry, 
a reflection of action or thought or feel- 
ing, is judged in no other way. The 
equipment of the best teachers of litera- 
ture is principally this, that by experience 
or study they have arrived at a coherent 
philosophy of life, and have therefore an 
instrument with which to take hold of new 
emotions and new thoughts. It makes lit- 
tle difference what our philosophy is, so 
long as it is sincere and thorough; of 
course, the more it explains of life and let- 
ters, the better it is, but the desirable thing 

[81] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

is to have some philosophy. If we can or- 
ganize our teaching of literature so that 
our students will come in contact with his- 
torical and philosophical masterpieces, we 
may hope that they will feel not too far 
estranged from, the atmosphere that sur- 
rounds the older poets, and that, once be- 
come contemporary with those poets, they 
will formulate a consistent chart of life 
by which to orient themselves in all poetry, 
even in that written to-day. 

IV 

The service that philosophy renders in 
giving insights into poetry is so simple 
that it needs no elaborate illustration. 
Yet I should like to suggest one or two 
examples, if for no other reason than be- 
cause I have come to believe that the 
magical "insights" we admired in our for- 
mer teachers can be acquired by anyone 

[82] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

who will first get, what they had, a sound 
philosophy. We shall probably derive lit- 
tle help from the usual books on esthetics, 
though it is to them that the literary man 
would naturally turn; rather we may ex- 
pect to find inspiration in those discus- 
sions which are not of art but of life. For 
myself, I have usually owed most to those 
simple observations on books which call 
attention to the behavior of our emotions 
in ordinary living. To make these ob- 
servations is perhaps the achievement of 
only the ripest philosophy. I recall a class- 
hour twenty years ago, when George Ed- 
ward Woodberry was initiating us into 
the genius of Keats. What was said at 
the beginning or in the middle of the 
period I do not remember, but just before 
the bell rang to dismiss the class Mr. 
Woodberry spoke of that wonderful last 
sonnet, "Bright star, would I were sted- 

[83] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

fast as thou art." He called our atten- 
tion to the fact that what Keats had to say 
was all in the final six lines, but that the 
first eight were more essential than per- 
haps they seemed, since without them we 
might not be in the mood to understand 
the poet's desire. Keats was leaving Eng- 
land, as he knew, to die, and his mind was 
on his betrothed, whom he was not to see 
again; in his sickness and despair he 
wished he might lay his head on her breast, 
and die in that comfort. "But," said Mr. 
Woodberry, "you cannot approach a 
stranger, who may be thinking of other 
things, and greet him with the news that 
you wish to lay your head on a certain 
woman's bosom ; he may misinterpret you. 
Knowing the need, therefore, of prepar- 
ing the reader for what he wishes to say, 
Keats makes us think first of the star, of 
the moon, of the moving waters, of the 

[84] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

snow on mountains and moor — images 
vast, exalted and austere; he colors the 
lofty mood which attends these images by 
words and phrases connoting religion or 
religious ceremonial — 'Eremite,' 'priest- 
like task,' 'pure ablution'; until our emo- 
tion, having passed through these intro- 
ductory disciplines, is purified to interpret 
correctly the poet's wish." 

These words of a great teacher of 
poetry illumine more than the verses 
under discussion ; they open a vista of that 
sort of skill in managing the reader and 
in allowing for the way words and images 
are understood, which was the special gift 
of Keats. After Mr. Woodberry has 
shown the method, it is easy to read other 
things in Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes, 
or the Ode on a Grecian Urn, for example. 
In The Eve of St. Agnes we have a story 
of exquisite delicacy, which must be told 

[85] 



THE KINDS OF POETKY 

with delicacy if told at all. Porphyro, the 
lover, knowing that Madeleine hopes that 
night to dream of her future husband, re- 
solves that she shall dream of him, or at 
least think she is dreaming of him. He 
therefore conceals himself in her room until 
she is asleep, and then with the soft chords 
of the lute he wakes her so gently that she 
sees him before she can distinguish the 
dream from the waking. She has really 
been dreaming of him, and now the actual 
Porphyro seems only the lover of her vis- 
ion, turned suddenly pallid. The diffi- 
culty of the story lies, of course, in the 
hiding of Porphyro in Madeleine's room, 
but Keats ennobled the scene, as he 
secured the meaning of his sonnet, by 
manipulating in advance the emotions of 
his readers. Madeleine's room has a win- 
dow of stained glass ; when she enters the 
door her candle — her "taper," as Keats 

[86] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

calls it — sends up its smoke in the pale 
moonshine, as if before an altar; the light 
of the moon falls on the silver cross she 
wears, and gives her hair a glory, like a 
saint's ; her robes fall to her knees, and she 
slips into her "soft and chilly nest" as 
though her soul were a missal clasped, or 
a rose shut, to be a bud again. So man- 
aged, the reader takes the scene as Keats 
intended, and the disrobing of Madeleine 
is one of the clear purities of literature. 
But after Madeleine is awake and Por- 
phyro has declared his passion, how is the 
poet to get her up and dressed, without 
breaking altogether the spell of the story ! 
Even to suggest the question would be dis- 
astrous. Keats has the lovers out of the 
castle before we can think of the problem, 
if ever we do think of it ; he lets the speed 
of the narrative sweep us over the danger 
before we know it is there. 

[87] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

The Ode on a Grecian Urn exhibits, I 
think, an even more wonderful knowledge 
of human nature. The poet describes the 
two scenes painted on the urn, first ren- 
dering them as though they were actual 
life, and then contemplating their immor- 
tality in art. Most readers would say that 
the method is the same for both sides of the 
urn — first the picture, then the praise of 
its immortality. But the subject-matter 
of the paintings was not amenable to this 
treatment, and Keats allowed for a differ- 
ence between one scene and the other. On 
one side of the urn a shepherd is piping, 
and a youth pursues a maiden. The 
painter has arrested forever in an attitude 
of beauty the swift flow of these experi- 
ences. 

"Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not 
leave 
Thy song, nor ever can those leaves be bare; 

[88] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss 
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not 
grieve ; 
She cannot fade, though thou have not thy 
bliss, 
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!" 

With this picture of things which the 
memory would gladly linger on, the poet 
knows we shall have no quarrel. On the 
other side of the urn, however, is painted 
a heifer led to sacrifice. If this picture to 
be immortal? Shall we contemplate for- 
ever the priest about to slaughter the vic- 
tim? Keats again gives us no opportun- 
ity to raise the question. With the poetic 
tact in which he is without a superior, he 
turns rather to a scene not represented on 
the urn, calls up the image of the village 
from which the sacrificial procession has 
come, makes us feel in a phrase the silence 
of the village streets, thus deserted, and 

[89] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

then contemplates the immortality of that 
lovely silence and solitude. 

"What little town by river or sea shore 
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, 
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn? 
And, little town, thy streets for evermore 
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell 
Why thou are desolate, can e'er return." 

These poems of Keats may be inter- 
preted by a wisdom of life that in its sim- 
plicity seems rather the happy wit of ex- 
perience than a system of thought. But 
more formal philosophy also may guide 
us from poet to poet. George Santa- 
yana's great sentence, that all life is ani- 
mal in its origin and spiritual in its pos- 
sible fruits, has given to many of us a 
scale against which to judge the complete 
poet, and also the poet who reports only 
our animal origins, or only our spiritual 

[90] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

fruits. If all life has a natural basis, then 
any art which tells the whole truth of life 
must portray that basis; and if life has 
also spiritual ends, then no art is complete 
which fails to portray those ends. The 
love of Romeo and Juliet is of course based 
on such a natural desire as starts youth 
always to seeking its mate ; Dame Nature 
seems to preside with as much puissance 
in Shakspere's drama as in Chaucer's 
allegory of St. Valentine's day. But 
Romeo and Juliet differ, let us say from 
Antony and Cleopatra, in that their union 
has a meaning also for the mind and the 
heart. Shakspere, reading life by a 
sound philosophy, comes at the truth that 
when we begin to be aware of a spiritual 
end in experience, the animal basis of it 
somewhat drops away from our thoughts ; 
when we are truly in love, therefore, our 
passion seems to us a yearning chiefly or 
[01] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

only of the soul. By this illusion, itself as 
natural as breathing, the hearts of men 
and women bestow upon the world a sig- 
nificance which without us it would not 
have, so far as we can see. Nor should we 
have occasion to feel this consecration of 
spirit, so far as we know, were we out of 
touch with the natural world. The poet 
who like Dante has gathered vast spiritual 
meanings from comparatively meager ex- 
periences in nature, and who tells us those 
meanings without initiating us into the 
natural basis of them, will prove for all 
but the rarest of readers a difficult poet — 
lofty and admirable, but not easily located 
in the world we know, not even in its 
heights. The poet should not separate 
himself from our world; rather, his art 
should rise upon it. 

And his art should rise. We will not 
listen without protest to a mere recount- 

[92] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

ing of those animal or material facts 
which, though undeniahle, are soonest for- 
gotten when we begin to consider the 
meaning of existence. It is a cheap trick 
of the so-called realist to strip away the 
spiritual raiment of life, that he may 
startle us with the sight of unaccommo- 
dated man. This is the one nudity which 
is unbearable. Our first parents faced it 
when, having sinned, they became realists, 
and were ashamed of themselves. "A 
lovely complexion is nothing but good 
digestion; why lose your heart to the 
efficiency of the digestive tract?" says the 
realist to the lover. "A violin is only a hol- 
low box, strung with cat-gut and scratched 
on with horse-hair; why be stirred by 
Kreisler's playing?" says the realist to the 
musician. "A flag is but a cloth, cotton 
or silk; why die for your country?" says 
the realist to the patriot. Life thus con- 

[93] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

sidered, exclusively in its physical bases, 
as if it had no spiritual ends, would seem 
indeed a tale told by an idiot, signifying 
nothing. Those who are tired of the world 
may like such a portrait of it. The sane 
man takes life as a whole, as a complement 
of body and spirit, and he gives his affec- 
tion to that poetry which follows the 
spirit, yet neither forgets nor dishonors 
the body. 



But let us return to our beginning. If 
our teaching of poetry springs from our 
delight in it, if we are not unwilling to 
read widely in the whole experience of the 
race, if we can recover from history some- 
thing of the past and can learn from phil- 
osophy to understand the present, what 
more shall we add? Only this — to be still 

[94] 



THE TEACHING OF POETRY 

as we were at the beginning, lovers of 
poetry. It was from the example of our 
teachers that we learned most. Together 
with the historian and the scientist they 
felt the lure of scholarship, but we looked 
to our teachers of poetry not for scholar- 
ship alone. If we are to give our own stu- 
dents what they look for, we must keep 
fresh in ourselves, as we grow older, a ca- 
pacity for that poetic experience which 
lighted our youth. No human task is eas- 
ier or more beautiful. Or is it a task, or 
only a happy way of life ? Plato described 
it for us. "Wise men are not philoso- 
phers," said the prophetess, "for they al- 
ready have wisdom ; and ignorant men are 
not philosophers, for being ignorant they 
do not know their need of wisdom." 
"Who then are philosophers?" cried Soc- 
rates. "Those intermediate persons among 
whom is Love." 

[95] 



THE NEW POETRY 



THE NEW POETRY 



IT is easy to see why the "New Poetry" 
should at first excite violent attack 
and also inspire indignant defense. 
Many of the new poems do look at first 
a bit outrageous, especially to old-fash- 
ioned readers who have not read widely 
in old-fashioned literature. If we have 
forgotten or have never seen Macpher- 
son's Osw'an or the prophetic raptures of 
William Blake, we shall get the full 
flavor of novelty in these irregular lines, 
saved to the eye as verse by the essential 
capitals, and saved to the ear by nothing 

[99] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

at all. If we have never been on familiar 
terms with Tennyson's English idyls, 
such as Dora or Walking to the Mail, we 
may think we have discovered a new art 
of flatness in blank verse which is like 
nothing so much as prose printed ten syl- 
lables at a stretch — good, chatty, domestic 
prose. Or if we have never felt the en- 
chantment of Baudelaire's prose or Cole- 
ridge's, we may wrinkle our brows over a 
page of solid type protruding polyphonic 
cadences here and there. But a reader 
who knows the history of poetic experi- 
ment in English literature, even if he is 
ignorant of other languages, will find in 
the new poetry nothing that is really new, 
and nothing that need be condemned on 
theoretical grounds. For he will have ob- 
served long ago that meter and rhyme are 
but accompaniments of poetry, and not 
poetry itself, which is an effect of beauty, 

[100] 



THE NEW POETRY 

never to be confounded with rhetorical in- 
ventions, and which is produced by differ- 
ent races in different ways, according to 
their tastes, and in different ways by the 
same race at different times. This effect 
of beauty, which is what we have in mind 
when we say that verse is or is not poetic, 
is not altogether likely to make itself felt 
through meters or rhythms which are 
strange to us ; yet we are not for that rea- 
son justified in refusing to master French 
or Greek prosody, nor is the contemporary 
poet necessarily foolish if he invites us to 
find poetry in his revival of old experi- 
ments in verse. 

These reflections seem obvious, but 
emphasis upon them suggests itself as 
remedy for the kind of attack usually 
made on imagism and free verse. To be 
annoyed at the new poetry because it 
shows a growing indifference to rhyme, is 

[101] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

to take a partisan stand on what has long 
been an open question — whether rhyme in 
English verse is a handicap or a blessing. 
Similarly, to complain that the imagists 
might as well print their work frankly in 
prose, since only the capitals tell us it is 
verse, is to lay ourselves open to the ques- 
tion whether we could distinguish Mil- 
ton's verse from his best prose, if the capi- 
tals did not give us the hint. English 
verse rhythms in the hands of the masters 
have been so free (I except Pope), that 
the line between them and prose rhythms 
has never been successfully drawn; it is 
often difficult, therefore, to distinguish, 
save by capitals, between the poetry a 
man writes in verse and the poetry the 
same man writes in prose. This fact the 
imagists have grasped, and they seem to 
realize that it is important, but just what 
use to make of it perhaps they do not al- 

[102] 



THE NEW POETRY 

together see. Obviously, if verse rhythm 
in English is already so free, it is unneces- 
sary to justify free verse by pointing to 
its "unrhymed cadence," whatever that 
may mean; and it is sheer nonsense to jus- 
tify this new appreciation of an ancient 
freedom by hinting that the freedom never 
existed before. On the other hand, the 
critics of imagism often forget entirely 
the principle which the imagists only mis- 
apply. A troubled scholar has been at 
pains to show that imbedded innocently in 
Meredith's novels are many sentences 
which, printed as free verse, turn out to be 
admirable imagist poems. But what has 
he proved? Only what he knew before, 
and what a glance at Bartlett's Familiar 
Quotations would have recalled to him, 
that great prose, like great verse, often 
contains great poetry. 

The suspicions aroused among the sen- 

[103] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

sitive by the supposed newness of the new 
poetry, have been aggravated by the 
stream of energetic but reckless self-ex- 
planation which has flowed from certain 
of the imagists. Had the new poets sim- 
ply written poems, with no campaign 
speeches in the interest of their own im- 
mortality, it might have been easier to 
realize that we are moving through one 
of those periodic and quite normal over- 
haulings of poetic method by which any 
literature keeps itself vital. Every little 
while it will always occur to the thought- 
ful that poetry is going a little dead, that 
somehow a fresh relation must be estab- 
lished between it and life. If this convic- 
tion comes to a genius, the results are 
likely to be for the great benefit of poetry, 
but whatever the results the conviction is 
a sign of health in those who feel it; for 
it is impossible that art should be too vit- 

[104] 



THE NEW POETRY 

ally related to experience. These con- 
temporaries, then, of whom we speak in 
a loose way as the new poets, are trying 
to restore vitality and reality to the tech- 
nique of verse-writing. The most settled 
of old-fashioned critics, no matter what 
he thinks of imagism, would probahly 
agree that few poems in the last twenty- 
five years have been in any great sense 
either vital or real. In their subjects as 
well as in their technique the new poets 
are trying for greater truth. Technically 
they wish to produce verses which will 
sound sincere, spontaneous, and natural. 
They wish neither the diction nor the 
rhythm of verse to depart so far from 
what the ear is accustomed to in common 
speech as to seem an artificial utterance. 
In this ideal they agree with Wordsworth ; 
like him, they would make the ordinary 
serious conversation of men in some sort 

[105] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

the standard of the poetic manner. If 
the rhythms they experiment with seem 
far removed from the Wordsworthian line, 
we should remember that the rhythms of 
our conversation and of our written prose 
to-day are also far removed from the 
rhythms of his conversation and prose. 
As for their subjects, the new poets wish 
to represent every picture as it looks to 
the eye, and every action as it is first gath- 
ered up in memory. Here again they 
parallel Wordsworth's desire to write with 
the eye on the object, but they stop with 
his method of observation ; they have little 
use for his philosophy of feeling. Indeed, 
the attempt to see things as they are leads 
them to a subordination of feeling, to an 
emphasis upon intellectual keenness, even 
upon wit ; so that many readers have sus- 
pected in this school a revival of the influ- 
ence of Pope. 

[106] 



THE NEW POETBY 

Yet the new poets have probably had 
Wordsworth or Pope but seldom in their 
thoughts, nor do they owe perhaps as 
much to the verse of contemporary France 
as some imagistic prophets, Miss Lowell 
for example, think they owe, or think they 
should owe. They derive their methods, 
unconsciously or consciously, from the 
masters of modern realism; that is, their 
art is the product of much novel-reading. 
For decades we have been absorbing prose 
records of manners, of characters, of 
scenes ; and almost any literary youngster 
in England or America has had some in- 
itiation into the "methods of fiction" or 
at least into the "art of the short story"; 
if we have taken no courses in these sub- 
jects in college, we have read books which 
made the whole matter clear, and most of 
us have tried to practise either the artful 
realism of the French or the naive realism 

[107] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

of the Russians — until a generation of 
readers and writers has grown up which 
sooner or later would be sure to transfer 
the methods of prose realism to verse. 
The new poetry is simply making the ex- 
periment for us. One obvious result of 
the transfer, as far as it has gone, is that 
we have something calling itself poetry 
which is curiously un-songlike — with no 
more singing-quality, in fact, than is 
found in the style of Turgenev or of Flau- 
bert. Whether this defect of music is in- 
evitable in novelized verse, or is only in- 
dicative of temporary embarrassments in 
a new medium, we must wait to see. But 
the fate of such a poet as Crabbe, nobly 
imaginative and passionately realistic 
though he was, should warn the new school 
what a retired corner of oblivion is re- 
served for the bard who cannot learn to 
sing. A second result of this transfer of 

[108] 



THE NEW POETRY 

realism is that all kinds of subjects are 
now available for verse, as they have been 
for the novel. This means that the charge 
once brought against prose realism, espe- 
cially as practised in France, that it often 
deals with subjects of no spiritual signifi- 
cance — at times, preferably with brutal 
subjects — may well be made now against 
some of these realistic poems, in which the 
physical and the coarse are no less humili- 
ating to the spirit than they were in prose. 
But this fault in taste is not essential in 
the method of realism ; moreover, some al- 
lowance may be made for crudity of sub- 
ject as well as of style in so bold an ex- 
periment. The main point is that the 
new poetry inherits its style from a prose 
ancestry and takes its methods and its 
subjects from the tradition of the novel; 
and we who like or dislike what we see are 
none the less witnessing one of those mu- 

[109] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

tations by which from time to time litera- 
ture re-invigorates itself, pouring old wine 
into new bottles or new wine into old bot- 
tles. In the Elizabethan period an im- 
mense amount of prose material was con- 
verted into poetic drama; a hundred years 
ago Scott took romance over into prose; 
now the new poetry is transferring to verse 
the brevity, the precision, and the honesty, 
of modern prose realism. 

II 

In the process of any such mutation an 
artist lays himself open to attack from the 
unsympathetic. It has not escaped their 
critics that certain of the new poets who 
are now much advertised, once wrote in 
the old-fashioned way and were obscure; 
what more obvious slur upon them, then, 
than to suggest that they have cultivated 
eccentricity out of desperation, having 
[no] 



THE NEW POETRY 

failed to master the legitimate art? Walt 
Whitman himself, it is recalled, wrote 
some mediocre verses in the accepted 
rhythms hefore he invented his wonderful 
recitative. But the critic will hardly raise 
this reproach unless he has somewhat lost 
his head; for surely an artist who invests 
and adopts a medium suitahle to his gifts, 
is not a knave but a sensible person, per- 
haps a genius. Unfortunately, the new 
poet rarely hears the reproach without 
also losing his head, his favorite retort be- 
ing that the old mediums are worn out, 
and only the uninventive would be content 
with them; whereas, for those to whom 
they are natural, the old mediums will re- 
main eternally modern. 

The unsympathetic critic and the exas- 
perated imagist may well take a lesson in 
good sense from Whitman, who honored 
the older art though convinced of the ne- 
[iiil 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

cessity — for him — of the new. They 
might well consider also Browning's very 
pertinent account, in Pippa Passes, of the 
great artist some day to arrive: "Since his 
hand could manage a chisel, he has prac- 
tised expressing other men's Ideals; and, 
in the very perfection he has attained to, 
he foresees an ultimate failure: his un- 
conscious hand will pursue its prescribed 
course of old years, and will reproduce 
with a fatal expertness the ancient types, 
let the novel one appear never so palpably 
to his spirit. There is but one method of 
escape: confiding the virgin type to as 
chaste a hand, he will turn painter instead 
of sculptor, and paint, not carve, its char- 
acteristics. . . . Foolish Jules! and yet, 
after all, why foolish? He may — prob- 
ably will — fail egregiously; but if there 
should arise a new painter, will it not be 
in some such way, by a poet, now, or a 
[112] 



THE NEW POETRY 

musician (spirits who have conceivea ana 
perfected an Ideal through some other 
channel), transferring it to this, and es- 
caping our conventional roads by pure ig- 
norance of them?" Whatever is lost in 
such a starting afresh, there will be this 
great advantage — provided, as Browning- 
says, that we do not fail egregiously: our 
originality will be unfettered, our poetry 
will be more vital, the life we know will 
come more completely into the grasp of 
art. Innovations in poetry are not with- 
out precedent, and it is clear that they 
often herald a renaissance, whether we cite 
for illustration Dante's use of the vulgar 
tongue, or Wordsworth's use of the com- 
mon vocabulary, or Whitman's use of free 
rhythms. The new poets may fail to jus- 
tify their departure from custom, but re- 
proach is hardly the proper greeting for 
their energetic attempt. 

[113] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

It may be observed that Browning's 
ideal painter has first acquired skill in an- 
other art, and therefore has earned his 
right, as it were, to spontaneous utterance. 
The defenders of free verse are charged 
with providing a dangerous opportunity 
for their fellow citizens to appear in print 
without any artistic discipline whatever. 
Anyone, it is said, can write free verse. 
Perhaps anyone can ; few of us, certainly, 
have refrained from trying, and the edi- 
tors of newspaper columns and magazines 
seem willing to air the attempts. But un- 
conscionable imitation is an incident to 
any success in art. Doubtless the new 
word-music of Petrarch and Dante in 
Italian encouraged many a cheap 
rhymester, who had neither their brains 
nor their training in Latin versification, 
to see what he could do in the mother 
tongue; certainly Wordsworth's use of 

[114] 



THE NEW POETRY 

conversational diction showed the way to 
a swarm of unpoetical folk who had 
neither his vision nor his feeling; and 
Whitman's departure from formal versi- 
fication may be held responsible for vol- 
umes of bald prose printed with one sen- 
tence to each paragraph. But the undis- 
ciplined in art are never likely to have that 
store of ideas which Browning's painter 
acquires while mastering poetry or music 
or sculpture; and we may be sure that 
oblivion is the reward of poetasters in any 
style who have nothing to say. 

Promiscuous writers of free verse may 
annoy, but not for long ; those who are fin- 
ally remembered will have earned their 
place by study and self-discipline. In- 
deed, instead of censuring the imagists 
for introducing an orgy of impromptu 
versifying, we might urge that the best of 
them have too lively a respect for their 

[115] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

literary background. They have perhaps 
got less clear of the old rhythms than they 
think; for though an apparent freedom is 
in their lines, their own reading of them is 
haunted by ancient metric patterns, often 
by certain echoes of Greek and Latin 
prosody. To the unclassical reader 
their aim must seem elusive, but those of 
us who remember enough of our Greek to 
appreciate a good translation, are stirred 
with subtle memories when we examine 
the best of this new work. We do not see 
how anyone can get the full force of — let 
us say — the Spoon River Anthology, who 
has never read the Greek Anthology — 
preferably in translation. The imagists, 
like the rest of us, are profoundly in- 
debted to Professor Mackail. Of course, 
the Greek melic poets, to whom the imag- 
ists refer us, composed in quite orthodox 
meters, but in faithful and dignified trans- 

[116] 



THE NEW POETRY 

lation they have much of the effect of the 
new free verse. We have all observed the 
same effect in Lafeadio's Hearn's transla- 
tions of Japanese poetry, which we are 
told is curiously in sympathy with imagist 
principles; we have observed the same ef- 
fect in the innumerable line for line trans- 
lations of Alcaic or Sapphic stanzas with 
which British scholarship furnishes us ; we 
have observed the same effect in those 
parts of Matthew Arnold's work which 
are most intentionally severe, and which 
often seem to be merely class-room trans- 
lations of some larger Greek poet. In 
short, for those who have undergone the 
usual academic drill in the classics or in 
any other language than their own, a good 
translation yields an insidious, romantic 
pleasure, a precise yet tantalizing indica- 
tion of what in the original was living and 
organic; and those who have the original 
[in] 



THE KINDS OF POETKY 

in mind will easily attribute its vitality to 
the translation, whereas the reader who 
knows only the translation will miss a 
great deal. It is this consciousness of 
translation, this romance of second-hand 
expression, which the imagists seem to be 
cultivating; we might say that the origi- 
nals of their poems never get written. 

Ill 

I have spoken of the Spoon River An- 
thology, by Edgar Lee Masters. This 
book, now familiar to us for several years, 
represents better than any other what the 
new poets strive for; indeed, like every 
book of great vitality, it shows already 
a disposition to swallow up the reputation 
of other works in its kind, and of other 
kinds of writing by its author. It had an 
immediate success, and brought Mr. Mas- 

[118] 



THE NEW POETBT 

ters an inundation of praise. lie was 
promptly welcomed by The New York 

Times as "the natural child of Walt Whit- 
man/' an honorable but not discriminating 

appraisal — and by many another journal 
as the poet of Americanism. On the other 
hand, he was sharply challenged for his 
chaotic rhythms, for his too frank sub- 
jects, for the bitterness of his outlook, and 
for the frequent anticlimax of his style. 
A few shrewd critics, detecting the novel- 
ist in him, compared his series of village 
portraits to the "Comedie Humaine." 
None, so far as I know, dwelt on the obvi- 
ous fact that the book is a collection of 
epitaphs, not of poems, and that with one 
or two exceptions the epitaphs follow or 
parody the style of the Greek inscriptions ; 
so that the severity of this style in con- 
trast with the undignified or ridiculous 
substance of many of the confessions, pro- 
Ins] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

duces that effect of irony, almost of bit- 
terness, which constitutes for most read- 
ers the distinct, if finally somewhat mo- 
notonous, appeal of the book. The crit- 
ics might have added that the method 
throughout is rhetorical, not poetic. What 
simple philosophy the inscriptions as a 
whole convey, is not insinuated to the soul 
through a melody, as in FitzGerald's 
Omar, but is discharged into the most re- 
luctant heads by rhetorical catapults. 
This mortal life is full of queer changes 
and chances, thinks the poet; therefore 
these epitaphs begin nobly and then drop 
us into bathos, into absurdity, into horror, 
or they begin on a plane of disillusion and 
then jerk us up into a poetic mood. Few 
books are so exciting to read. A still more 
searching criticism might have been made, 
that while Mr. Masters calls our attention 
with remarkable power to the physical or 

[120] 



THE XKW POET Im- 
material facts of life, he too seldom in- 
cludes the ideal values which properly 
go along with those facts and which arc at 
least as important in human experience 
and destiny. This criticism, it should he 
noticed, is such as would more frequently 
concern a novelist than a poet. 

But whatever has been or might he said 
for or against the Spoon River A nthology, 
and whether it be the work of an iinagist 
or not, it is easily the most effective prod- 
uct so far of the new vitality in our litera- 
ture. Among its other services, it has 
cleared the air for American verse; after 
its hard, clean-cut intelligence the vapor- 
ings of "Petit the Poet" are for the time 
being at least self -condemned. And since 
Mr. Masters, like the novelist he essenti- 
ally is, kept a consistent point of view in 
all his character-portraits, it seems that 
our volumes of verse must henceforth pre- 

[121] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

tend to the same kind of unity, no longer 
serving as receptacles for cold magazine 
poems miscellaneously gathered up. 
While the influence of the book endures, 
our poetry is likely to engage itself with 
studies of American character, whereas 
hitherto it rarely approached nearer to 
the facts than to theorize lyrically as to 
what Americanism should be. If Mr, 
Masters had published, nothing but the 
Anthology, I should have added that 
wherever the book continued its influence, 
the lyric note would give way to realistic 
painting; but in his later volumes, from 
Songs and Satires to Starved Rock, there 
is promise enough that contemporary 
poetry may keep its realism and regain its 
singing voice. I do not refer to those or- 
thodox lyrics in regular metres with which 
some of Mr. Masters' later books are di- 
luted ; we must think them early work, for 

[122] 



THE NEW POETKY 

some unlucky reason resurrected. I reft r 
rather to the pieces in the freer rhythms, 
which published alone would have made a 
volume far more important than the Spoon 
liivcr Anthology, but less scandalously 
startling. 

Robert Frost's North of Boston dates 
somewhat earlier than the appearance in 
book form of the Spoon River Anthology, 
but for obvious and not discreditable rea- 
sons it made its waj^ more slowly. The 
book is entirely without the rhetorical 
brilliance and the irony of Mr. Masters, 
and the subjects it treats of are fewer and 
narrower; yet there are persons who con- 
sider it the most solid poetic achievement 
of our day. In his observation and in his 
style Mr. Frost constantly suggests 
Wordsworth. He avoids the free rhythms 
of the imagists, not apparently because 
he cannot use them, but because he does 

[123] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

not need to, since the Wordsworthian con- 
versational line affords him all the free- 
dom he desires. Like Mr. Masters, he 
has the novelist's point of view, and here, 
of course, he departs from the Words- 
worthian tradition; he studies characters 
and manners for their own sake, and 
though everything he writes indicates a 
deep and broad human sympathy, he per- 
mits himself less moralizing or philoso- 
phizing than is found even in the Spoon 
River Anthology. Occasionally he strikes 
out a haunting line, rarely powerful and 
rarely obvious, but not to be forgotten — 
like the first line and the last in the vol- 
ume: "Something there is that does not 
love a wall," and, "With the slow smoke- 
less burning of decay." And the beauti- 
ful prologue and still finer epilogue sug- 
gest that the low poetic temperature of 
the main part of the book is intentional, 

[124] 



THE NEW POETRT 

and that when he chooses Mr. Frost can 
turn pure lyrist. Indeed, his poetic 
equipment is in its way far more subtle 
than that of Mr. Masters, but lie has as 
yet shown no such range of observation, 
no such mental vigor, no such ability to 
grip the attention, and it remains to he 
seen whether he can handle other subjects 
than those in his book — country incidents 
and characters, for the most part eccentric 
or unusual. The style of the Spoon River 
Anthology has been imitated and paro- 
died, but not its content, for Mr. Masters 
gets his subject matter out of his own 
point of view, which cannot easily be imi- 
tated. It is the subjects, however, of 
North of Boston which have invited par- 
ody, for Mr. Frost has generally selected 
material which needs only to be tran- 
scribed in order to be effective. If this is 
to be his permanent method, his range 

[125] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

may be small and his contribution finally 
negligible, for he will have to avoid the 
obvious things that lie in the highway of 
our interest. But the poem which he 
wisely set at the opening of his volume, 
Mending Wall, a noble interpretation of 
a familiar incident, gives assurance of 
powers not yet developed in him. 

Miss Amy Lowell has made herself the 
chief apologist for imagism, and we there- 
fore think of her first as a critic and as an 
orator; not even such clever books as 
Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds and A 
Dome of Many-Colored Glass and the re- 
cent Pictures of the Floating World could 
dwarf her reputation as a theorist and 
propagandist. Without her aid as advo- 
cate, there would probably have been no 
new "school" at all — only the poetry of 
Masters and Frost. What her reputation 
would have been had she confined herself 

[126] 



THE NEAV POETRY 

to creative writing, probably none of us 
is impartial enough to guess correctly. 
The defects and the merits of her verse 
are singularly obvious, yet a mere recital 
of them helps us little towards appraising 
her ability. She writes easily in the new 
rhythms and awkwardly in the old; she 
has little knowledge of character, in the 
novelist's sense; she has little interest, it 
seems, in what goes on in modern society; 
she is the most literary of all the new 
school, and her subjects are entirely book- 
ish; she seems to have, finally, no special 
aptitude for the lyric or for narrative, as 
we can see clearly from such labored per- 
formances as Ghms are Keys, On the 
other hand, she is a wit, and she has a tal- 
ent for monologue. It is not surprising, 
therefore, that her best poems, in spite 
of their imagist intentions, appeal to the 
ear rather than to the visual imagination. 

[»7] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

and one has only to hear her read them to 
know how beautifully sensitive she is to 
the spoken phrase. In this department 
she has rendered American verse a great 
service, for poets always need to be re- 
minded, either by precept or by an attrac- 
tive example, that the natural phrase is a 
sacred thing, not to be sacrificed to exi- 
gencies of the line or the rhyme. Of 
course it does not follow that we need sac- 
rifice the line or the rhyme to the exigen- 
cies of the phrase. But Miss Lowell's 
verse and her reading of it have helped to 
restore to contemporary verse firmness 
and naturalness of phrase — or, as she per- 
haps would say, of cadence. 

In fact, her insistence upon the quality 
of the phrase is of the greatest importance, 
and is sufficient cause for the attention 
she has deservedly received. The cadence 
of American speech is no longer the same 

[128] 



THE NEW IMHiTRY 

as that of English, and it was from Eng- 
lish models that the hest American poets 

fifty years ago learned the cadence hoth 
of their speech and of their verse; it is 
not surprising therefore that to the Ameri- 
can ear to-day the fall of Tennyson's line, 
or Lowell's, or Longfellow's, sounds 
strange, almost foreign. Our average 
fellow-citizen speaks more directly now, 
with less subtlety and also with less delay. 
Our conversation is a succession of ham- 
merstrokes, not links of sweetness long 
drawn out. Whether or not we approve, 
this is the fact, and we need not wonder 
that a people whose talk is such should ask 
for verse which preserves, in however ele- 
vated a form, the same fashion of dis- 
course. In this point at least the younger 
generation hail Miss Lowell as a prophet 
of their sentiments; she quotes for them 
verse which sounds American, whatever it 

[129] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

may mean, and they have been hungry for 
verse the cadence of which should be native 
to their ear. 

IV 

As for the imagists as a whole, it is in- 
conceivable that the general reader should 
ever have found them perplexing, had not 
their poems been introduced and accom- 
panied by a critical defense too often un- 
sound and distracting. I do not myself 
know who belong to the school and who 
do not, though I have read all the defini- 
tions of Miss Lowell and her collaborators. 
To me the new poets generally consid- 
ered important all seem eligible as imag- 
ists, and I would include Edward Arling- 
ton Robinson, who was studying the cad- 
ence of American speech before Miss 
Lowell gave her attention to it. Most of 
us first heard of imagism in the January 

[130] 



THE NEW POETRY 

number of Poetry, 1913, where a London 
correspondent of the magazine, Ezra 
Pound, had this to say: "The youngest 
school here that has the nerve to call it- 
self a school is that of the Imaghtes. . . . 
Space forbids me to set forth the pro- 
gramme of the Imagistes at length, but 
one of their watchwords is Precision, and 
they are in opposition to the numerous 
and unassembled writers who busy them- 
selves with dull and interminable effusions, 
and who seem to think that a man can 
write a good long poem before he learns 
to write a good short one, or even before 
he learns to produce a good single line." 
Had the theory of imagism remained so 
simple and so sane, there could have been 
no just quarrel with it. There could be 
little objection to the three rules of imag- 
ism, as formulated by F. S. Flint in a later 
number of Poetry: "1. Direct treat- 

[131] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

ment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or 
objective. 2. To use absolutely no word 
that did not contribute to the presentation. 
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in 
sequence of the musical phrase, not in se- 
quence of a metronome." But even in 
these innocent rules, two tendencies of 
later imagistic criticism show themselves — 
the tendency to use blind phrases, and the 
tendency to ascribe awful shortcomings to 
the older rhythms. "To compose in se- 
quence of the musical phrase." Does that 
mean the same thing as "to compose in the 
musical phrase?" Have we been puzzled 
by some words that "did not contribute to 
the presentation" of this theory? And 
what English poet, save George Gas- 
coigne, unknown to imagists, needed to be 
told not to compose to the metronome? In 
the same number of Poetry the London 
correspondent, having evidently become 

[132] 



TILE NEW POETBT 

heart and soul devoted to the school, gives 
a list of "Don'ts by an Imagiite" a com- 
bination of platitudes and original non- 
sense which is either amusing or exasper- 
ating, according to your temperament. 
The first advice under the head of 
"Rhythm and Rhyme" begins: "Let the 
candidate fill his mind with the finest ca- 
dences he can discover, preferably in a 
foreign language, so that the meaning of 
the words may be less likely to divert his 
attention from the movement." 

The advice to translate, the advice to 
take counsel of the contemporary French 
poets, which this critic gives freely, is in 
tune with Miss Lowell's statement, in the 
preface to her Sword Blades and Poppy 
Seeds, that she owed an immense debt to 
the French, to the Parnassian and to the 
later groups. Indeed Miss Lowell finds 
it difficult to speak of poetry without cit- 

[133] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

ing the admirable qualities of the French 
and the general shortcomings of the An- 
glo-Saxon. She also finds it difficult to 
cite this unfortunate difference without 
adding an elusive illustration — elusive at 
least to the mere English or American 
brain; so that those who have read or 
heard her criticism learn to expect shortly 
after any reference to modern French 
poetry, a depressing sense of having lost 
their bearings. To illustrate by a para- 
graph from this same preface : 

"It is because in France, to-day, poetry 
is so living and vigorous a thing, that so 
many metrical experiments come from 
there. . . . The poet with originality and 
power is always seeking to give his read- 
ers the same poignant feeling which he has 
himself. To do this he must constantly 
find new and striking images, delightful 
and unexpected forms. Take the word 

[134] 



THE NEW POETRY 

'daybreak, ' for instance. What a remark- 
able picture it must once have conjured 
up! The great, round sun, like the yolk 
of some mighty egg, breaking through 
cracked and splintered clouds. But we 
have said 'daybreak' so often that we do 
not see the picture any more; it has be- 
come only another word for dawn." 

That is: because poetry is vital in 
France, we get metrical experiments from 
the French. A real poet writes to convey 
his feeling to the reader. (Exit the topic 
of metrical experiments.) To convey 
your idea to your reader, you must get a 
new image. (Enter the topic of images.) 
Take "day-break" for instance. (Exit 
the French entirely, along with the metri- 
cal experiments.) Miss Lowell appar- 
ently thinks that the sun at dawn pops 
out, great and round, through cracked and 
splintered clouds. 

[1351 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

Since Miss Lowell has done most of 
the pleading for imagism, it is not sur- 
prising that though she is sometimes the 
least effective advocate the school has, she 
is also sometimes the best. To her is com- 
monly attributed the excellent preface to 
the anthology called Some Imagist Poets. 
The principles of imagism, she there tells 
us, "are not new; they have fallen into 
desuetude. They are the essentials of all 
great poetry, indeed of all great litera- 
ture, and they are simply these: 

"1. To use the language of common 
speech, but to employ always the exact 
word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely 
decorative word. 

"2. To create new rhythms — as the 
expression of new moods — and not to 
copy old rhythms, which merely echo old 
moods. We do not insist upon 'free verse' 
as the only method of writing poetry. We 

[136] 



THE NEW POETRY 

fight for it as for a principle of liberty. 
We believe that the individuality of a 
poet may often be better expressed in free 
verse than in conventional forms. In 
poetry, a new cadence means a new idea. 

"3. To allow absolute freedom in the 
choice of the subject. . . . 

"4. To present an image (hence the 
name: 'Imagist'). We are not a school 
of painters, but we believe that poetry 
should render particulars exactly and not 
deal in vague generalities, however mag- 
nificent and sonorous. . . . 

"5. To produce poetry that is hard and 
clear, never blurred nor indefinite. 

"6. Finally, most of us believe that 
concentration is of the very essence of 
poetry." 

Probably any good craftsman at any 
stage of poetic history would subscribe to 
this pronouncement, if allowed to define 

[137] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

the terms which it employs. But prob- 
ably a mature poet would also observe that 
these excellent rules, like most which the 
imagists give us, have this trait of youth, 
that they operate from the outside inward. 
Acquire new cadences, the imagists advise 
us, so that you may express a new idea; 
yet if we have the new idea and try to 
give it sincere expression, it is hard to see 
how we shall miss a new rhythm. The ex- 
cellence of Mr. Masters and of Mr. Frost 
is that they have built their art from the 
inside outward, and their success illus- 
trates once more, what the young poet will 
not easily learn, that a large audience 
waits for those whose heart and mind com- 
pel them to speak. If the new poets as- 
pire to great work, they will take heed to 
their subjects as well as to their technique; 
they will put themselves in touch with the 
ideas that are stirring our democracy, and 

[138] 



THE NEW POETRY 

they will make themselves our spokesmen. 
To such an end the study of French poetry 
will aid chiefly the French poets. In 
France the poets have access to many in- 
tellectual groups, and can at any time 
catch early glimpses of the visions which 
later are to fire the whole people. In this 
country the only organized seeding 
grounds of ideas are the large universities, 
and for academic centres our poets nowa- 
days have some contempt. Yet if it is 
to go far, the new poetry will somehow 
associate itself for mutual sympathy and 
interpretation, with every vital stream of 
social and philosophical thought. The 
poetic instruments are ready. The sub- 
jects lie before us. But the readers who 
now wait for the poets have had too long 
a discipline to bestow the laurel on the 
mere phrase-maker or on the unthought- 
fuL 

[1391 



SCHOLARSHIP AND 
POETRY 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 



IT is our habit when we study poetry 
to study it somewhat exclusively from 
the point of view of the reader. We 
counsel the reader to seek in the great 
poems not an historical record nor a philo- 
sophical doctrine but a poetic experience; 
but in either case we usually imply that 
only the reader has a relation to poetry 
and that the only kind of scholarship of 
which criticism should give an account is 
the scholarship which helps us to admire 
what the poet has created. But the poet 

[143] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

needs a scholarship of his own before he 
can create at all. 

If criticism has not paid sufficient at- 
tention to this kind of scholarship which 
belongs peculiarly to the poet, perhaps it 
is because many critics believe sincerely 
that the poet should not be a scholar, that 
much learning will check his inspiration 
or at least will taint his song with book- 
ishness, that the artist is likely to be most 
happy in theme and in manner when his 
emotions play freely upon life, unpreju- 
diced by the feelings other men have had 
in the same situation and unconstrained 
by the haunting cadence or the persistent 
accent of their voices. To be sure, the 
critics would not entertain such a theory 
if they realized the difference between the 
scholarship which is good for the reader 
and that which is good for the poet. The 
knowledge of history will bring the reader 

[144] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

to the doorstep of the poet he studies; it 
will enable him to approach old poems as 
though he were contemporary with them ; 
and when it has brought him to the same 
date as the poem and to the same back- 
ground as the poet had, the possession of 
a philosophy will enable him to enter into 
the poet's thought. Yet there is no rea- 
son why the poet should be historian or 
philosopher. He might of course be both ; 
Dante and Shakspere and Milton were to 
some extent historians and philosophers. 
But the scholarship of which the poet sim- 
ply as a poet has need is the knowledge 
and the command of his language. The 
reader, since he sees first the frame and the 
outer flesh, as it were, of poetry, must learn 
to observe that inner heart of it which is 
subject to no evolution, but is the same 
alwajrs; the poet, however, who begins 
with an inspiration that seems to him im- 

[145] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

mortal, must learn to speak in the tongue 
of his day and place. Like other artists 
he must be master of his medium. 

Let us add that by language should be 
understood far more than words and far 
more than grammar. The poet must in- 
deed be an artist in words, but a pedantic 
interest in his vocabulary will without 
question harm him rather than aid. By 
language let us understand not only the 
sound of our syllables but all that we talk 
with besides — those familiar stories, 
images or allusions, those memories of 
typical experience and of characteristic 
action, which more than mere words estab- 
lish communication between men. To 
make ourselves understood at all it is 
necessary to use language long repeated; 
whatever other originality an artist should 
have, he should not try to invent a new 
speech, for if he does so he will for the 

[146] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

time at least be the only person who under- 
stands it. How often primitive man must 
have tried his earliest syllables and must 
have listened to the elementary grunts and 
groans of his neighbors before he and they 
were quite sure what the inflection and the 
accent meant. Even in the most devel- 
oped language we need a setting to be 
quite sure of our exclamations. The first 
man who stubbed his toe on a boulder 
may have said "Ouch" as the most culti- 
vated philosopher would say it now, but 
who could tell whether his mental state 
was one of anger, or of half amusement, 
or of heroism in making light of a seri- 
ous hurt? With centuries of tradition in 
any civilized tongue we are not always 
sure what such expressions really convey, 
unless we know the speaker and under- 
stand the incidents in which he has ex- 
claimed — in short, unless we know the 

[147] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

setting of his emotions. The size of an 
artist's audience, whether the artist be 
important or very minor, depends upon the 
carrying power of the language he uses, 
and this carrying power depends among 
other things on the number of times the 
language has been used. To be generally 
understood, therefore, language must be 
traditional, and art, to be enjoyed by more 
people than the artist, must have and must 
preserve a certain continuity in the gen- 
eral mind of the race. 

If poetry begins with the primitive 
sounds of speech and if those sounds must 
be repeated an infinite number of times 
before they have gathered into them- 
selves a race significance, the next stage 
in the growth of poetry may be illustrated 
by those human episodes which in their 
more coherent forms we call folk-lore — 
brief narrative framings of attitudes 

[148] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

which have struck the attention of men. 
A very few appeals to memory are often 
enough to indicate character and to call 
up a more precise portrait of our experi- 
ence than we could trust to the single 
word. Emerson thought that the founda- 
tion of this stage of poetry lay in nature; 
"the proverbs of nations," he says, "con- 
sist usually of a natural fact, selected as a 
picture or parable of a moral truth. Thus : 
A rolling stone gathers no moss; A bird 
in the hand is worth two in the bush; A 
cripple in the right way will beat a racer 
in the wrong; Make hay while the sun 
shines; "Tis hard to carry a full cup even; 
Vinegar is the son of wine ; The last ounce 
broke the camel's back." We do indeed 
use nature to talk with; but we also to a 
much greater extent convert human con- 
duct into speech, and certain aspects of 
behavior soon become a kind of verbal 

[149] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

counter with which to reckon the char- 
acter of our fellows. "When he began to 
act that way," we say, "I knew what kind 
of man he was," or "A person who would 
do that would rob a church." In the street 
the least literary of us is still talking with 
these faint suggestions of narrative. "It's 
like taking candy from a child," we hear 
the passer-by remark ; in the phrase there 
is already a plot. 

If we obviously cannot talk at all with- 
out sounds, it is just as true, though not 
perhaps so generally recognized, that we 
can have no important poetry without 
folk-lore or whatever one cares to call 
these incipient stories which men make up 
in order to communicate with each other. 
The business of the great poet is to com- 
municate with his fellow men by using this 
common language which their practice has 
already prepared for him. However new 

[150] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

may be the message he brings, he must 
speak the language they understand. In 
order to be a poet at all, therefore, he must 
have the mastery, not only of words, but 
of what is even more important, those nar- 
rative elements which are most current in 
the consciousness of his fellows, and he 
must cultivate the tact with which to turn 
those elements to a new meaning. To- 
ward this kind of scholarship, as I said, 
criticism too seldom directs our attention. 

II 

Yet it is not overrash to say that all the 
great poets have had this kind of scholar- 
ship; they have drawn on old material, 
which their audience knew well, and by 
means of it they have said something new. 
What their method was we can observe 
by following the course of any world- 
story as they changed it and rededicated it. 

[151] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

The story of Odysseus, for example, 
was old long before Homer told and 
changed it. In the folk-lore of the Greeks 
Odysseus seems to have been at first a very 
tricky man, one who could be counted on 
to make his way by crafty methods. He- 
siod tells us that when the suitors were 
wooing Helen, Odysseus sent her no gifts, 
believing that Menelaus would win her 
anyway. We cannot be sure that this 
thrift was disapproved in the first stage 
of the legend ; childish strategy of this sort 
has in other instances won the admiration 
of simple minds. But in a more complex 
version the character of Odysseus before 
Homer ennobled it was clearly remem- 
bered by the Greeks with scorn and con- 
tempt, and this version was the more popu- 
lar. In it Odysseus, the trickster, was 
contrasted with Palamedes, the truly wise 
man. Palamedes, according to legend, 

[152] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

had invented certain letters of the alpha- 
bet ; he had combined in a convenient form 
and domesticated, as it were, the luck of 
mortal existence by the invention of dice; 
he was the first to build lighthouses; he 
invented certain measures and scales which 
came into general use; and he first made 
the discus, and developed that art of 
throwing it which to the Greeks as well 
as to us typifies their physical grace. In 
short, he was a singularly public-spirited 
genius, and his direct contributions to the 
welfare of the community had in them 
poetic implications, which elevated the 
memory of their inventor. Odysseus, on 
the other hand, invented nothing of bene- 
fit to mankind, and his cleverness usually 
served him best at those moments when he 
wished to avoid a public obligation. When 
Menelaus called upon the other suitors to 
remember their oaths and come to the res- 

[153] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

cue of Helen, Odysseus pretended to have 
gone crazy, and to prove himself mad he 
began to plow the sea-shore with furious 
zeal. It was Palamedes who unmasked 
the trick, by setting Telemachus, the in- 
fant child of Odysseus, in the very path of 
the frantic oxen and the sharp plow. 
Odysseus turned the oxen aside, thereby 
showing that he had his wits about him. 
He made no further protest against tak- 
ing part in the Trojan expedition, but he 
plotted revenge, and later, as one of the 
cyclic poets recorded, he caused Pala- 
medes to be drowned while he was en- 
gaged in fishing off the coast of Troy. 
There was another version of the treach- 
ery; Odysseus was said to have placed 
Trojan gifts in the tent of Palamedes, 
and to have persuaded the Greeks that 
the wise inventor was in communication 
with Priam, so that they stoned the inno- 

[154] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

cent man to death for a spy. This is the 
story as Ovid rememhered it in the Meta- 
morphoses. 

Homer for some reason chose to take 
another view of the character of Odysseus. 
Perhaps he had no need in his epics for 
two rivals in shrewdness. At all events, 
he suppressed entirely the legend of Pala- 
medes, never even mentioning the name 
of that hero, and he imagined Odysseus 
as a noble character, admirable in his be- 
havior as a warrior, long-suffering in his 
wanderings, and by his heroic endurance 
deserving well the brilliant restoration of 
his fortunes on his return. Palamedes lin- 
gered for a while in the race-memory of 
the Greeks as the type of magnanimity 
done to death by meanness ; one of the lost 
plays of Euripides took him for its theme. 
But the genius of Homer sufficed to es- 
tablish Odysseus permanently in his career 

[155] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

as romantic hero, and his earlier reputa- 
tion gradually faded away. 

The poets who, following Homer, com- 
pleted the story of Troy and of the Greek 
heroes, were reluctant, it seems, to let the 
adventures of Odysseus end in a quiet old 
age in Ithaca ; so inquisitive a nature, with 
so long a habit of wandering, could hardly 
be content with a sedentary life. His ex- 
periences were continued, therefore, in two 
ways — he was represented as enjoying 
new adventures, and as suffering the retri- 
bution, as it were, of former ones. The 
poem called the Telegony told how he be- 
came restless after a while, and how, mak- 
ing some excuses to Penelope, he sailed 
to the island of Thesprotis, tarried there 
for some time, and was even wedded to 
the queen of the country. This episode, 
an obvious echo of the sojourn with Circe 
or with Calypso, was feeble enough as a 

[156] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

prolongation of the legend, and would 
hardly draw our attention now, if a greater 
poet than the author of the Telegony had 
not revived the idea that after a brief stay 
in Ithaca Odysseus once more took ship. 
The Telegony gave also an account of the 
wanderer's death. Hesiod says that when 
Odysseus had lingered in Circe's halls, 
she had borne him three sons, one of whom 
was Telegonus. The author of the Tele- 
gony, adapting an old situation familiar 
in folk-lore and known to modern readers 
in the story of Sohrab and Rustum, of 
Cuchulain and Conloach, told how Tele- 
gonus grew up and at last went forth to 
seek his father, and how, arriving at Ith- 
aca, unrecognized and without means of 
recognizing the aged king, he accidentally 
met him, got into a quarrel with him, and 
Oedipus-like killed him. What color the 
poet gave the story we do not know, since 

[157] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

the plot here recounted survived only in 
the summaries of literary historians. Evi- 
dently it made no impression on the popu- 
lar imagination, and for hundreds of years 
Odysseus remained what Homer had made 
him. 

It was Dante who next developed the 
story. He also was persuaded that Odys- 
seus did not remain at home after the re- 
turn to Ithaca. In the twenty-sixth canto 
of the Inferno Ulysses and Diomed ap- 
pear among the Evil Counsellors, and 
Ulysses tells how he died. Neither love 
for his son, he says, nor love for his father, 
nor the love he owed Penelope, could over- 
come his ardor to know more of the world, 
of human vice and virtue; therefore he 
put forth to sea in a single ship with the 
few old comrades left, and they came to 
the narrow waters where Hercules had set 
up his pillars, that men might not venture 

[158] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

beyond. There Ulysses appealed to his 
fellows, in the brief twilight of life remain- 
ing, not to deny themselves knowledge of 
the uninhabited world behind the sun. 
"Remember from what you come; you 
were not made to live like beasts, but to 
follow virtue and knowledge." They then 
became so eager for the voyage, that he 
could hardly have checked them, and 
turning toward the dawn they pursued 
their foolish flight; till there appeared to 
them a mountain, the highest they had 
ever seen, and from this new land a tem- 
pest arose, which sunk the ship. 

Dante does not mean to approve of this 
quest of Ulysses; he makes the repentant 
spirit call it himself a "foolish flight." He 
does not otherwise intend that Ulysses 
should have our admiration. Without any 
reference to the old story of Palamedes, 
the Italian poet is the champion of Rome, 

[159] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

and to him Ulysses and Diomed would 
naturally seem evil counsellors; he says 
specifically that their torments in hell are 
for their treachery in the matter of the 
wooden horse, for their forcing Achilles 
into the Trojan war and so to his death, 
and for their theft of the image of Pallas, 
the loss of which made it possible for Troy 
to fall. The advice to wander once more 
was only the last evil counsel which Odys- 
seus gave. But in spite of this prejudice 
Dante, true poet, himself a tragic wan- 
derer, makes Odysseus speak with a noble 
accent when he admonishes his companions 
to remember from what they came — not 
to live like beasts but to follow virtue and 
knowledge. 

4 * Considerate la vostra semenza : 
fatti not foste a viver come bruti, 
ma per sequir virtute e conoscenza." 

[160] 



SCHOLARS II I T A XI) POETRY 

These are the lines in Dante's account of 
Odysseus that have touched modern sen- 
timent, and have seemed to modern poets 
worthy of expansion. It is not without 
significance that in Alan Seeger's beauti- 
ful rendering of this canto Dante's con- 
demnation of the quest shrinks to nothing; 
the "folle volo" is not translated at all. 
Thought he worked from the Italian text, 
the young American poet was really echo- 
ing Tennyson's Ulysses, in which Dante's 
phrase of the following of knowledge is 
made to illuminate modern horizons. In 
Tennyson, for a while at least, this old 
world-story of Odysseus becomes once 
more fixed as a part of our language; by 
these changes at the hands of scholar- 
poets, the legend of trickery and treach- 
ery has been transmuted into the image of 
a long-memoried race still in the search for 
truth — 

[161] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

this grey spirit yearning in desire 
To follow knowledge like a sinking star 
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 



Ill 

The story of Prometheus has had per- 
haps an even more distinguished experi- 
ence in literature than that of Odysseus, 
though it can be somewhat more briefly 
told. Hesiod says that the Titans, the 
"Strainers," were so called because they 
strained after the power of the gods, and 
in the earliest version of the story Prome- 
theus, the greatest of the Titans, was sim- 
ply a kind of tricky Odysseus who carried 
on by his wits a prolonged and disastrous 
warfare against Zeus. He began by de- 
ceiving the god in the first partition of the 
sacrifices. Having slain an ox, he placed 
in one pile the savoury meat covered with 

[162] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

the skin and in another the skeleton cov- 
ered with the mere fat; and lie then asked 
Zeus which portion should belong to the 
gods. Zeus rather greedily selected the 
fat pile, and discovered later than he had 
done what Prometheus wished him to do. 
In revenge he withheld from earth alto- 
gether the gift of fire. Prometheus then 
managed to steal the fire from heaven and 
bring it back to men. Zeus then had Pan- 
dora created with her fatal gifts, and sent 
her into the world to be the ruin of man- 
kind. However the fact seems prettily 
disguised, the legend meant that in order 
to punish Prometheus Zeus created 
woman to be the pest of man henceforth. 
Prometheus himself was bound to the 
crag. Later stories told how he was re- 
leased from his torture by Heracles. 

This myth in its early form laid equal 
stress upon the disposition of the sacri- 

[163] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

fices, upon the stealing of the fire from 
heaven, and upon the creation of Pandora. 
It was the genius of Aeschylus that he em- 
phasized in the story the stealing of the 
fire. His great play Prometheus Bound 
made the Titan, once for all, the image of 
those saviours of mankind who scale even 
the heights of heaven for the good of the 
race. So far as I know, no other poet has 
ever elevated a common legend by selec- 
tion so simple to a meaning so sublime. 
From the day of the Greek dramatist un- 
til now European literature has spoken 
through the image of the Titan when it 
would express revolutionary and humane 
ideals. No one has attempted since 
Aeschylus to alter the character of Prome- 
theus; later poets have occupied them- 
selves with the secret of his deliverance, 
explaining how he did at last get free 
from the crag. It was not in the temper 

[164] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

of modern times, at least, to account for 
this deliverance solely by the advent of 
Heracles. Rather it seemed necessary to 
place the secret of his rescue in the logic 
of his own character. It would be super- 
fluous now to discuss in detail the many 
heautiful versions of the deliverance of 
Prometheus, since George Edward 
Woodherry has studied them at length 
for us in that rare book of his, The Torch. 
From more recent literature might be 
added other illustrations of tin's develop- 
ment of folk-lore and legend into the ma- 
ture language of poetry. The English 
race has often expressed itself through the 
character of King Arthur. He is one per- 
son in Malory, another in Spenser, and 
quite another in Tennyson, to take the 
three main instances; and in each case his 
story is made to indicate what that per- 
ticular age had to say. We are not al- 

[165] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

ways quick, perhaps, to observe the im- 
mense difference between these versions. 
In Tennyson, for example, when Arthur 
bids farewell to Guinevere in an austere, 
beautifully-worded declaration of his own 
virtues and of her errors, we take it for 
granted perhaps that Arthur always loved 
Guinevere above everything else in the 
world, and that his relation to her, in all 
histories of him, was the most precious 
he recognized. Unless we are aware of 
the immense difference between chivalry 
before Spenser and chivalry after him, we 
are startled to come on the terms with 
which Arthur in Malory's book laments 
over Launcelot and Guinevere, dismissing 
the loss of his queen as a minor misfor- 
tune, and spending his chief tears on 
Launcelot. "Alas that ever I bare crown 
upon my head, for now have I lost the 
fairest fellowship of noble knights that 

[166] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

ever held Christian king together. Alas, 
my good knights be slain away from me; 
now within these two days I have lost 
forty knights, and also the noble fellow- 
ship of Sir Launcelot and his blood, for 
now I may never hold them together no 
more with my worship. Alas, that ever 
this war began. . . . Wit ye well, my 
heart was never so heavy as it is now, and 
much more I am sorrier for my good 
knights' loss than for the loss of my fair 
queen, for queens I might have enow, but 
such a fellowship of good knights shall 
never be together in no company; and 
now I dare say," said King Arthur, "that 
there was never Christian king held such 
a fellowship together, and alas that Sir 
Launcelot and I should be at debate." 

It is not necessary here to recall Shak- 
spere's habitual use of old material for 
the plots of his dramas; in the kind of 

[167] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

scholarship proper to a poet he was one 
of the most scholarly children of the 
muses, who were themselves, according to 
the Greek myth, the children of memory. 
It was his habit to make his play always 
on some theme already widely diffused, 
but to transmute the old story into the 
more exquisite experience which he alone 
could imagine. To compare Macbeth in 
the chronicle with Macbeth in the play, 
or the Romeo and Juliet of Arthur 
Brooke with the young lovers of the same 
name now dear to all who read, is to won- 
der first at the closeness with which Shaks- 
pere follows his material, and in the sec- 
ond place, at the extraordinary originality 
of what he says with it. He would be bet- 
ter understood if we remembered that for 
him the plot itself was a part of the 
language with which he portrayed human 
nature, and that the changes he makes in 

[168] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

an old story are but as a novelty of accent 
on a familiar word. To master his whole 
intention we must therefore he ourselves 
somewhat scholarly in the language he 
employs; sometimes we must know what 
was the earlier version of the plot before 
we can quite see the character he would 
portray. Many actresses play Viola in 
Twelfth Night as if she were somewhat 
melancholy; the shadow of her shipwreck 
and the possible loss of her brother ap- 
parently suggest to them that she had in 
her some tendency to brood upon fate. 
Aside from the episode of the shipw r reck, 
however, nothing in the drama would sug- 
gest that she was otherwise than light- 
hearted, witty, and life-loving — a close 
cousin to Rosalind, though with her own 
individuality. Unless one know r s some- 
thing of the story before Shakspere used 
it, the shipwreck engages more of our 

[169] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

sympathy than it deserves. The earlier 
version is of a girl who for love of the 
Duke, of whom she has heard, goes to his 
country disguised as a boy, and takes 
service with him, under the name of her 
own twin brother. From Shakspere's de- 
velopment of his sources in other plays, 
we are assured that his usual purpose in 
altering a plot is to refine or spiritualize 
some character ; hero or villain in his treat- 
ment becomes more deeply penetrated 
with mind than before. The Viola he con- 
ceived of could go through the other ex- 
periences of the original story, but she 
would not set out with the crude resolve 
to look up the eligible young man she had 
heard of. He therefore brings her to 
Illyria by accident, and in his time ship- 
wreck was a familiar accident. The 
opening of the play, therefore, is not to be 
understood as a vision of sudden death, 

[170] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

remembered sensitively by a feminine De 
Quincey; it is simply as though the story- 
teller began, "Now Viola happened to 
arrive in Illyria, where lived a certain 
Duke." 

The same poetic scholarship can be ob- 
served in more modern instances, and not 
exclusively in the narrative or dramatic 
poets. Burns and Wordsworth are as 
good examples as Shakspere, in spite of 
the general belief on the part of their most 
devoted readers that their inspiration was 
not from books but from nature without 
and from their own hearts within. Words- 
worth thought we might get moral wis- 
dom from an impulse of the vernal wood ; 
the theory is not impaired by the patent 
fact that he often got material for his 
poems from what others had written — 
from his sister's diary, from books of 
travel, from other poets. Like Shakspere 

[171] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

and Homer and all the artists, whatever 
their degree, he made the old material ex- 
press something personal and original 
with him; like them also, he never tried 
to invent a new experience of life nor a 
new language. His lines To a Cuckoo 
are not less beautiful because they are a 
rewriting of Michael Bruce's poem, nor 
The Solitary Reaper less original because 
it is taken, in some lines word for word, 
from a sentence in Thomas Wilkinson's 
Tour in Scotland, nor the Ode on the In- 
timations of Immortality less majestic be- 
cause Wordworth had studied Henry 
Vaughan's Retreat. Of Burns the same 
thing can be said. He was saturated with 
Scottish song and folk-lore, and the care- 
less readers who detect in Duncan Gray, 
or My heart is sair, or Comin thro 9 the rye 
nothing but the improvisings of a natural 
poet, do not know Burns. There is no 

[172] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

such thing as a natural poet, if hy natural 
we mean without art; for all art is con- 
tinuous in its language, however spontane- 
ous in its impulse, and a poet who was ig- 
norant of the tradition prepared for him, 
or who did not use it, would be reduced 
to the same meagerness of expression, in 
so far as his audience is concerned, as man 
experienced in the childhood of the race, 
until some more complex brain began to 
utter itself in new sounds — sounds novel 
to its own ears and incomprehensible to 
others. 

Not Browning himself, our modern- 
seeming psychologist, who takes his 
themes so obviously from the life around 
him, is independent of traditional lan- 
guage. He was more than scholarly, he 
was antiquarian in his search for old 
stories with which to say new things; in- 
deed, the material out of which he made 

[173] 



THE KINDS OF POETKY 

his language was often not only old but 
unfamiliar, so that even when his thought 
was not difficult, his expression of it fre- 
quently was. Fra Lippo Lip pi might be 
compared with Landor's Filippo Lippi 
and Eugenius IV, in the Imaginary Con- 
versations, if one needed an example of 
what Browning drew from his predeces- 
sors. The comparison might remind us 
also what his debt was to Landor for other 
things than this one character. Landor 
taught him especially the method of psy- 
chological dialogue. But what did Lan- 
dor not teach, to a host of nineteenth cen- 
tury poets, from Southey to Swinburne! 
Himself unusually learned in poetic ma- 
terial, he was rarely able to say with it a 
message that the general reader could ap- 
preciate; but the poets understood him, 
and through them his language and much 
of his content has been spread abroad. 

[174] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

We do not yet recognize as perhaps some 
day we shall, how variously he enriched 
modern English literature. 

IV 

If folk-lore, or a body of legend and 
stored-up experience, must be diffused in 
a nation before there can be a literature, 
it is not surprising that poetry in the 
United States is still an undeveloped art. 
Not undeveloped, perhaps; it would be 
fairer to say that its development is ar- 
rested. We formerly had for a time a 
common literary inheritance, understood 
by people of average education. Now, 
however, we are become a nation of many 
ancestries — which in art means of no an- 
cestry at all. Those Americans whose 
heritage is British can understand the 
poet who speaks in the language of Eng- 
lish poetry; those whose race-memory is 

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Latin, or Slavic, or Oriental, can follow 
the stories of their particular groups; but 
no group is likely to be at home in the tra- 
dition of the other, and since a natural 
good-will suggests that we do not talk 
too much of things our neighbor does not 
understand, we are impelled not to use at 
all the old material of poetry. There still 
might be for many readers in this coun- 
try, as there is for European readers, a 
kind of international language of poetry 
derived from the classics; we are not yet 
so far away from our Latin and Greek, 
once the language of all poets, that we 
cannot use an old story of Athens or 
Rome, to express some new idea. No 
English poem in recent years is more mod- 
ern in feeling than Stephen Phillips' 
Marpessa or his Christ in Hades, nor does 
any French poet in the last fifty years ex- 
press a larger share of the modern spirit 

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SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

than Auguste Angellier in his volumes 
Dans la Lumiere Antique. But within 
the United States a prejudice has grown 
against all poetic tradition, therefore 
against the classic. Our democratic im- 
pulse to speak of nothing which our neigh- 
bor cannot understand is leading us fast 
to assume that our neighbor can under- 
stand very little, and the mere sight of a 
Greek or Roman name in a poem is 
enough to frighten off the majority of re- 
viewers and readers. The poet, therefore, 
who writes in the poetic terms of any na- 
tionality now represented in the United 
States is likely to limit his audience to his 
fellow-nationals, and the poet who uses 
what used to be the lingua franca of poetry 
by transforming familiar classic myth into 
a modern story, runs the risk of estranging 
all readers, whatever their origin. 

The obvious remedy would seem to be 

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to encourage the growth of American 
legend and to use in our poetry the myths 
we already have. Until very recently, 
however, there has been no great disposi- 
tion to do this; in fact many of the new 
poets have embarked resolutely on an- 
other policy, which however mistaken is 
undoubtedly sincere, and which is sug- 
gested by the predicament in which the 
American poet finds himself without a 
ready language familiar to his audience. 
These new writers of whom I speak have 
attempted in theory to revitalize the words 
and the images of poetry; they have at- 
tempted to observe more sincerely the 
world about them as it is, and their own 
sensations and emotions as they have them. 
They have tried to omit as far as possible 
what might be called the attendant acci- 
dents of experience ; they would give us in 
every poem the heart of the matter. To 

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SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

this end they have striven for conciseness, 
brevity and clarity. It would be a stupid 
kind of critic, no matter how devoted lie 
was to older manners and poetry, who 
would not recognize and applaud the mo- 
tives of this young school. But it would 
be stupid also not to observe that in the 
pursuit of their ideal these poets, instead of 
revitalizing their art, are simply retracing 
the history of poetic language back to its 
aboriginal meagerness. Language began, 
let us repeat, in brief personal utterances 
understood only by the speaker; it devel- 
oped as the frequent repetition of these 
sounds taught the speaker himself and his 
hearers to attach meanings to them. It 
developed still further as the meanings of 
words expanded into episodes of common 
experience — the larger language of 
poetry. Now that we are destitute of this 
larger language, the new poets of whom I 

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speak, trying to find the specific word for 
each idea and sensation, seeking clarity as 
they understand it, have stripped the noun 
bare of its adjective and the verb of its 
adverb, and as far as possible have omitted 
all but those words whose reverberations 
may suggest the inmost quality of their 
message. The result of this practice is 
obvious in the verse which appears now in 
most of our magazines; the same result 
shows itself in much modern painting and 
in some modern music. You read the 
poem and perhaps admire some parts of 
it more than others, since those parts are 
clearer to you, or you find difficulty in 
making quite sure what any part means. 
When the language of poetry was devel- 
oping toward the hope of complete com- 
munication between man and man, the con- 
fession that you did not quite understand 
him would have worried the poet. Nowa- 

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SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

days the confession only indicates to him 
that you do not move in his world. "What 
does this line mean?" you ask. He may 
explain to you, if lie is amiable, that it 
means to him the sensation he enjoys 
when he hears a Beethoven sonata. In 
your surprise perhaps you exclaim, "I 
never should have imagined it meant 
that," and perhaps he will answer, "That 
is what it means to me." In some such 
dialogue might be summarized not the 
least interesting part of the discussion 
which has been waged on our new poetry. 
The protagonists in the movement have 
dedicated themselves to that early condi- 
tion of poetic utterance in which the poet 
makes his own language and thereby be- 
comes his own audience and his own critic, 
each confined to his own little world, be- 
cause no one else yet understands the lan- 
guage he speaks. 

[181] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

Yet if American poets were to follow 
the natural method sanctioned by the us- 
age of the masters, they could find ready 
at hand much legend of a high quality. 
The Leatherstocking tales, to name an 
obvious example, may very well be re- 
written from century to century, so long 
as the romance of the Indian and the 
charm of Deerslayer's character continue 
to haunt us. Much in Cooper's style and 
in his narrative method has ceased to 
please readers accustomed to greater 
swiftness and greater precision of state- 
ment, but Leatherstocking himself re- 
mains a living character about whom later 
generations, as well as our own, may well 
have something to say. It would need no 
great genius to turn such a romance as 
Deerslayer or The Prairie to new poetic 
account. Ichabod Crane and Rip Van 
Winkle present us with the same oppor- 

[182] 



SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

tunity from living's pages. Indeed only 
yesterday, as it seems, Joseph Jefferson 
was acting his version of Rip, and though 
the American audience hardly realized 
that the stage hero was not altogether the 
character Irving portrayed, the second 
version was closer to the sentiment of our 
times. There have heen other rewritings 
of this story, and there will be more. The 
main point is that we should feel no te- 
merity but rather an obligation to tell 
again the stories, few indeed but perhaps 
enough to start with, which have taken 
complete hold of the American imagina- 
tion. It is easier in the United States to 
write about Rip Van Wrinkle than to 
write about Alexander Hamilton or 
Thomas Jefferson, for Rip Van Winkle 
is better known to us. For the same rea- 
son it is easier to write about Lincoln than 
about Washington. It w T ould now be quite 

[183] 



THE KINDS OF POETEY 

impossible to write of Benjamin Frank- 
lin with any hope that the audience would 
come to the reading prepared to recognize 
an old acquaintance. But these char- 
acters from fiction which I have men- 
tioned are already part of our national 
language. 

A more remarkable opportunity per- 
haps which the right poet, when he arrives, 
will not neglect, is the cartoon figure of 
Uncle Sam, which awaits only the happy 
assistance of genius to pass from his sphere 
of dim but wide popularity into the world 
of national art. Uncle Sam is perhaps 
more real now to the majority of Ameri- 
can children than Lincoln himself. His 
features are obviously the product of our 
life and our climate ; the character that he 
almost has is strikingly akin to ours. If 
we only knew his family history — who are 
his relatives, how he earns his living, what 

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SCHOLARSHIP AND POETRY 

his voice sounds like when he speaks! The 
poet who will tell us this will do for Uncle 
Sam what Cinderella's godmother did for 
the pumpkin and the lizards — though the 
cartoon figure is much nearer to the thres- 
hold of life than was the raw material of 
the godmother's magic. 

I take it as a happy augury for our lit- 
erature that many writers to-day, even 
though theoretically committed to new 
and revolutionary methods, are instinc- 
tively turning to the material of our past 
for their subjects. To be sure, they usu- 
ally try to revive some historical episode, 
forgetting perhaps that America is not 
very familiar with its own history, and that 
such episodes of antiquity as the opening 
of Japan by Admiral Perry will hardly be 
recognized by the majority of American 
readers. Yet the tendency to use authen- 
tic material as poetic language is itself 

[185] 



THE KINDS OF POETRY 

sound, and when more of our poets have 
cultivated this kind of scholarship, an 
American poetry can begin. 



THE END 



[186] 



